A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 716

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 716: Where Have You Been Gallivanting?

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Ragna had assumed Enkrid would tell him where he needed to be.

It was a kind of faith. And Enkrid said nothing to him.

Why?

Looking at the battlefield in broad strokes, the front was being held by his father, his mother, and Lynox. That made Ragna the rear guard, pulled back just a step.

So up to now he had cut down his share of Demon Creatures, but he had not stepped to the front. Should he go to his father's side? He looked ahead and saw a threatening enemy closing in. Before his mother, a Death Knight was forcing its head up through the earth.

Where was he supposed to be?

Why hadn't the captain told him?

Standing in that slightly uncertain position, watching the battlefield from a distance, he started to understand.

Why the captain had said nothing.

Is this fight the captain's?

No. He was support here.

The reason I'm angry is that this is my home.

He would live as part of the Madman Knights out of Border Guard. That decision was made long ago. It would not change.

Even so, Zaun was the place he was born and raised.

What I leave behind.

He knew the answer now. He would leave Ann. He would leave Enkrid. Framed in broader terms, he would leave people behind.

He hoped there would be room for his father and mother in that, too.

Ragna lifted his foot and moved. He knew where he was going. The target of this anger lay somewhere past the battlefield.

Whatever crises his father and mother faced, they would overcome on their own.

The driving rain and wind threw off any sense of direction.

Sssssssss.

The cries of the Scaler pack dulled the senses themselves.

The sorcery serpent hovering overhead pressed down on the body and twisted all five senses.

And far in the distance, a Medusa stared with wide-open eyes, a Demon Creature more than capable of ruling a Cursed Ground, making it impossible to look straight ahead.

That was exactly why Ragna felt it now: the talent blazing inside him.

The path is clear.

No distortion of the senses could block the road that natural-born talent laid out.

Ragna started walking.

This was something Enkrid had not anticipated.

Honestly, he had wanted Ragna to stay at the rear and lunge forward when needed. Well, nothing ever went exactly as planned. That was the battlefield. That was life.

That unpredictability was what made people happy sometimes and sad at others.

This time, fortunately, it was something to smile about.

"Where are you wandering off to like that?"

After walking quite a while, using Demon Creatures as landmarks, someone spoke to Ragna. A familiar voice.

Shhhhh.

A middle-aged man stood there, soaked through by the pouring rain, his hair plastered flat against his forehead and face. He was peeling strands away from his face as he waited for Ragna to answer.

"I was on my way to find whoever caused this mess," Ragna said.

"Did you get lost?"

"No, I think I'm right where I need to be. Finding the way is my specialty."

Heskal was a composed person. The type who wouldn't show agitation more than once a year. Even when bickering with Lynox, he never flushed. Even when pushing back against the family head, he never raised his voice, always finishing with quiet words.

Very few had ever seen him angry. And yet even Heskal had an edge in his voice now, sharpened by irritation.

"Why didn't you stay put?"

"I saw the path, so I walked it."

Ragna's flat tone carried the particular confidence of someone who believed in himself. That twisted something in Heskal. If Ragna had stayed still, finding him would have been quick. Instead the fool had moved, and now they were a good distance from the battlefield.

Heskal himself had taken a long detour just to track him down.

Why was this man wandering alone through the reserve monsters being held in position? He was out of his mind. And yet Ragna himself insisted this was the right path.

If I had ignored you, you'd have gotten lost and stumbled back after it was all over.

From Zaun's perspective, an uncertain coincidence had turned into fortune. If Heskal hadn't gone looking, Ragna would never have found him.

But if Enkrid had been there, watching the path Ragna walked, he would have understood the intent behind it.

Not that it made any sense to Heskal.

Every dangerous fight was being fought right now, and instead of helping, this man was here alone.

It was a mess from any tactical standpoint, and looked no better from a human one.

Why come here while ignoring the threats bearing down on his father and mother?

"If I were Tempest, I wouldn't have let you just do as you please."

"You're smaller than my father."

Ragna said it without missing a beat. Being around Enkrid made you think about a person's capacity in that way. As he spoke, Ragna turned over the road he had walked to get here.

I've learned a lot.

Truly.

Pick up a sword and the fixed path, the path to walk, comes into view on its own. But until you actually walk it, you cannot know the shape of the road.

The road he had walked up to now had climbs. It had descents. Parts of it had been rough, and parts had been smooth and well-worn.

Walking it himself, putting his feet to it, had changed what he learned.

There is no fixed path. As the process changes, everything changes.

Who decides the limit?

Anyone who wasn't a fool letting others' words bind them got to set their own limit.

When you say "this is as far as I go," that is where it ends.

Enkrid had looked his limits in the face and refused them. Ragna had learned that and followed.

The road that goes past the limit.

It's interesting.

The thrill he felt the first time he gripped a sword surged through him again.

What could compare to the joy of pushing forward, and forward again, into a new world?

Heskal's eyes dropped to Ragna's greatsword. The blade was smeared with mud.

"Ilchul isn't with you."

Ilchul was a longsword. There did not appear to be room on Ragna's body to hide even one more blade.

"I'll come back for it later."

"So you don't have the confidence to beat the family head?"

The condition for earning Ilchul was receiving the family head's recognition, and Tempest Zaun was not the kind of man to entrust a family relic to someone weaker than himself. Not even to his own son, simply because he was his son.

"My weapon is an Inscribed Weapon," Heskal said.

Yours isn't.

The words left unspoken carried that meaning. Ragna ignored it and gripped the greatsword with both hands. The tip still touched the ground. He wasn't raising it to the sky, it hung behind his hip.

"Are you keeping your sword low because you're afraid of lightning?"

A few words was all Heskal needed to read Ragna. Or try to.

He doesn't take risks.

Habits formed in childhood don't change easily, and Ragna had one: he didn't stray from the laid-out path. Heskal remembered that.

If he has time to beat an opponent, he won't try to beat them today.

No fierceness in Ragna. He had always learned and mastered things easily, thanks to talent, so caution had worked its way into his bones.

Would a handful of battles on the continent have broken him of that? Probably not.

For someone to shake him out of it, they would have to give a genius a real sense of crisis.

But how many people had talent comparable to Ragna's? Truly rare. Even rarer outside of Zaun.

Even within Zaun, no one came to mind.

Had he ever met an opponent worth taking risks against?

No. Training constantly beside someone whose talent matched your own was one of Zaun's strengths.

Ragna had never had that. A talent that drew envy from others had made him this way.

"Have you learned to give everything you have?" Heskal asked.

Ragna didn't answer. His red eyes pushed light through the dark. It was proof that Will filled his body, brimming full.

I'll rate his ability higher than I thought.

Heskal had a habit of marking opponents a step above his own estimate.

So he never fought at full force. He always hunted for openings. He moved on the assumption that forcing a decisive clash was disadvantageous.

Forget trying to win through raw Will output or brute strength.

Trap with the Correct and Precise Sword, strike with the Illusionary Sword. That was his strategy.

Simple, if you wanted to call it simple. But anyone on the receiving end knew it was anything but.

Focus Point was originally a technique passed down through the Zaun family. Which meant both of them knew it.

Even while trading words, both of them began thinking at speed.

I'll kill you and throw your head at the family head's feet.

That was Heskal's thought.

Ragna thought nothing. He only felt the texture of the greatsword in his hands. A moment later, he forgot even that.

Heskal moved first.

He kicked off the ground and thrust his sword at a pace that seemed almost too slow for a knight. His left hand folded behind him. He rotated his body sideways and drove the thrust forward. Body became a line, sword became a point, aimed straight at Ragna's forehead.

Ragna stepped sideways with the greatsword still in his grip.

Skrch. Ting.

The tip of the greatsword caught the edge of a stone embedded in the ground, one that had held its place through the storm, scraping against it. A few stone chips scattered.

The thrust dodged, the two of them shifted positions and faced each other again.

Heskal still held his left hand folded behind him.

Whatever he was hiding in that left hand was no small trick. That much was obvious.

Heskal's Inscribed Weapon moved again. Everyone who had stood beside him, even his adopted son Riley, knew the name of his sword.

The sword's name was Routine.

It moved on a fixed path with fixed force, and it was named that because even knowing this, it was hard to stop.

"Your father is dying even as we stand here talking. Ragna."

Heskal said it in his usual gentle tone. Warm and easy, as if he were concerned and urging Ragna to go check.

What it actually was, was an attempt to gain a mental edge.

"Do you really believe that?" Ragna asked.

"The family head has been weakened by illness for years now. Withered and thin, you saw it yourself."

He had. But that was knowing one thing and missing another. Ragna remembered his father from when he was small.

"Alexandra will be fighting the Death Knight."

Not a word about going to protect her. Only the words that would scratch deepest. Ragna felt nothing.

Before-before meeting Enkrid and the Savage and that sly wildcat and the fanatic, maybe those words would have shaken him. But not now.

Enkrid's mouth was sharper than that, and the Savage could be more underhanded still.

"Heskal."

"Say it."

"Your hair's thinned a lot. The rain makes it real obvious."

Ragna struck casually, without malice.

Heskal wasn't the type to be rattled by something like that, but he was mildly surprised.

"You've gotten sharper with words since I last saw you."

"My sword is sharper still."

"That remains to be seen. But do you really plan to face me without an Inscribed Weapon? I'll give you a chance. Run. Abandon Zaun again, the same as before. It's fine. No one will blame you for it."

Seasoned through and through. At reading nerves and pricking at them, he was Enkrid's match.

The bald-spot attack hadn't landed on this one.

"I never abandoned it," Ragna said.

"No? Then was it us who abandoned you?"

Trying to win the war of words was pointless. Ragna didn't want to do this, but he borrowed Rem's tone for a moment.

"Shut up and come at me. Baldy. What's the point of flapping that useless mouth? Your breath stinks."

The moment he said it, Ragna felt something unpleasant. But it had landed, at least a little.

Heskal's brow drew inward, just briefly, then eased back.

"Remarkably low-class language. You'd struggle to hear that even in the hunters' village."

"That's what happens when you stay in a well your whole life. Go out on the continent. Head west and you'll find plenty of people whose mouths smell like rot."

Rem being a prime example.

Heskal drew a breath and moved his lips as if about to say something more, then thrust his sword without warning.

Twice as fast as before. Ragna dodged again.

The blade nicked his shoulder. A section of the leather pauldron was cut away.

The exchange continued, both of them hunting for openings, and Ragna swung the greatsword too, an upward slash from low to high.

Thoom.

The air burst. Heskal stepped back.

In his time, Heskal had been one of the three finest talents in Zaun.

He evaded the slash that pushed even the raindrops aside, then settled back into the same thrusting stance and drove his sword forward again.

Ragna moved sideways once more, but Heskal's sword suddenly stretched.

It extended far past what any thrust should have reached. A completely unanticipated attack.

Heskal had never told anyone the real name of his sword.