WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 718: Talent and Guarantee

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Heskal's gaze shifted to Ragna's eyes.

Those eyes, which had been cast downward, rose like a sun cresting the horizon and fixed on him directly. The light moving through the pupils of those red eyes seemed to scatter the darkness around them.

Golden hair, red eyes, a face that called to mind the woman once considered the finest sword talent ever born and raised in the Zaun line.

"You."

Before Heskal could manage another word, Ragna spoke in a tone almost laughably composed.

"When I hold a sword, the path appears. Walking that path is simple, that's what I told you."

Those were words Ragna had said as a child. Heskal reached back through memory and recalled hearing them the day he was laying the foundations of the Correct Sword form for Ragna. Ragna had learned it in exactly one day, then refused any further lessons the next morning.

After that, Heskal had concluded that Ragna lacked something essential.

Those without the drive to improve could not survive inside Zaun.

Ragna Zaun was the perfect embodiment of that rule. In the end, Ragna left.

A flower that would show off its talent among mediocre peers, burn bright, and wither before ever reaching its limits.

But what happens when that flower throws itself into a life of danger and earnest struggle?

The answer was standing right here.

When Ragna held a sword, the path appeared to him. Driving an opponent into a dead end was no harder than walking a road he could already see.

And that was exactly the dead end Heskal had been pushed into.

Distance, position, posture, all of it had become walls, and walls made paths. Because Heskal believed the path in front of him was one he had opened himself, he walked it without hesitation, and that was how he ended up trapped in the labyrinth.

The choice now belonged to Ragna, not Heskal.

He might as well have been caught in a web he could not move through freely.

It was not a lack of physical ability, nor had he been tripped up by mind games. He had seen enough life-or-death combat to know how to shoulder risk.

Ragna's sword was ready to spring at any moment.

'Did I misjudge him?'

Ragna had backed Heskal into that corner. There was no more room for trickery. The only option left was to bring the sword straight down.

'No matter which way I move, I get cut.'

Retreating would be the worst choice.

Not that the current situation was any better.

Meeting the blow head-on would send the hidden blade inside the camouflage weapon slicing through empty air. But there was no room for that kind of scheme anymore.

All that remained to Heskal was overpowering his opponent by brute force. He would have to abandon the Illusionary Sword and win through the Basics, with everything he had behind them.

Ragna shifted the angle of his toes slightly. That was enough to close off any remaining space for breath or words.

The chain of thought following the word "clumsy" may look lengthy, but in reality it was razor-short.

By the time Ragna said it and Heskal responded and they exchanged a few lines, Ragna's feet had already changed direction and the greatsword was already dragging across the ground. It set off along the trajectory Ragna intended. The rain-soaked earth parted without a sound.

A wide, open road. Smooth without a single pebble, firm ground that felt good underfoot.

That was the road visible to Ragna's eyes.

Crackle.

The air tore, and Ragna's blade was already at Heskal's face.

Heskal reacted. He drove his sword down with everything he had.

In that last moment, he chose the best option still open to him. He poured every scrap of Will into the camouflage weapon and went for a blade-severing strike.

His was an Inscribed Weapon. Ragna's was not. Use the weapon's advantage, split the opponent's sword, drive through, and cleave from chin to brow. The best possible choice.

In that instant, Heskal saw a faint, milky glow rise from Ragna's blade, and the moment he saw it, he felt the end.

'Ah.'

A knight's insight lets them know their own death before it arrives. More precisely, through high-speed thought, they come to understand that they are dying.

What remains in that moment is only the final choice. And that final choice can define everything a knight has lived for.

If you want to survive, you will fight desperately to throw death off.

If you were fighting an enemy you absolutely had to kill, you might swing your sword to the last, aiming to take them with you.

Rarely, there were those who made stranger choices, guided by will and conviction alone.

The greatsword struck Heskal's blade and shoved his arm aside. Ragna's greatsword pressed straight through, passed into Heskal's left thigh, tore through the inside of his body, and came out the other side. The instant Heskal recognized his own death, he twisted his body with the last strength he had. In terms of sequence, it was just after the greatsword struck his blade. The force he had been gathering for one final desperate strike, he redirected entirely into wrenching himself sideways.

In other words, he moved before his body could be split open.

'Not the heart.'

Crack-crack-crack-crack!

Thw-BOOM.

The sword had moved so fast that the sound arrived late, striking the space the greatsword had already passed through.

Flesh tore and blood sprayed sideways.

Heskal never lost his grip on the sword, but his arm was thrown upward. He collapsed backward, and his posture somehow looked as though he were still holding the sword and bracing against something.

A single question left Ragna's lips.

"Why?"

Starting from the left thigh and running all the way through to the shoulder, there was no surviving that. The reason Ragna asked was Heskal's final action.

There had clearly been an opening to land one more blow, and Heskal had twisted away from it instead.

"Cough!"

Blood flew from his mouth with the cough. Far less than what was pouring from his body.

By then, his body was bleeding so heavily that rainwater could not hope to dilute it, and his organs saw the outside world for the first time in his life.

"Get away from me."

Heskal gathered the last of his Will, forced air into his lungs, and said it. Ragna's body moved to obey on instinct.

Where they had been standing was right beside a reserve unit of Demon Creatures.

Hundreds of Demon Creatures had gathered there, watching the fight or waiting for an opening, it was hard to say which. Ragna pulled back the greatsword and leaped backward.

More than twenty steps between them. A clear gap. A moment later, when Ragna glanced back, he saw Heskal's body explode.

Bom.

It was not a particularly loud sound.

But what followed had a massive effect on everything nearby, regardless.

Ssssss!

The Scalers screamed.

As Heskal died, blood droplets scattered in all directions from his body at the center. Every Demon Creature the blood touched rolled their eyes back and died.

It looked as though he had stored corrosive poison inside his body and detonated it on death.

Why he had given Ragna time to clear out was a mystery.

Though that was something to think about later.

Ragna turned his head. Heskal was dead.

Did that count as reaching his objective?

No. He had never been lost to begin with. Heskal had misread the situation.

When your destination is clearly visible in the distance, how could you lose your way?

Ragna's target had been the Demon Creature with snakes for hair from the start. He had simply been walking toward it all along.

Heskal had only stepped into the way. Nothing had changed. Ragna kept walking.

* * *

Shhhhh.

The wind had eased. The rain had not.

The downpour washed away the organs and brain matter of Demon Creatures Enkrid had killed, diluting the black blood until it seeped into the ground.

Right after Fanito died, several Scalers with unusual abilities pulled something brazen. They extended their hands to use telekinesis and, at the same moment, launched their claws like arrows.

The claw arrows were black, the color of something dipped in ink, though obviously they had not been soaked in ink for the sake of writing poetry.

Three of them had done it. Each had fired four to six claw arrows. Every last one was like a venomous snake in flight.

Accelerated by telekinesis, the claws carved through the wind and rain in curves, twisting freely like snakes as they came.

Enkrid tracked them not by sight but by sound, then jerked his head aside at the last instant. The ones that followed in staggered timing he smashed apart with Three-Iron.

A claw he had not broken spun around and came back for the nape of his neck from behind.

In the brief window while the claw reversed direction, Enkrid rushed forward and split the Demon Creatures' heads open one by one, top to bottom.

The remaining claws lost their force and dropped to the ground.

More Demon Creatures pulled unusual tricks after that.

They were, without question, elite Demon Creatures, carefully selected.

The ones launching claws and steering them with telekinesis. The ones bursting their own skin to spray droplets of blood. He cut through all of their necks and split all of their heads.

Dodge or smash the claw arrows. When blood droplets were about to burst, step back before they did.

Strong Legs drove his speed higher, and a trained body with honed balance let him move in any direction, forward, back, left, right.

Move fast enough to confuse the Dynamic Visual Acuity of a telekinetic Scaler, unpredictably enough that they cannot anticipate you, and you will never be caught by telekinesis.

As he cut through Demon Creatures, stray thoughts drifted in.

'Tricky to deal with? They are that. But not truly threatening.'

Ghoul Jerix came to mind. Was the name Jerix? Or Jeris?

Either way, the ghoul he had met in the City of Aoara had also been a special individual, one that had survived long enough to earn a name.

Compared to that one, these felt like a clear step below.

It was not simply that the ghoul had lived longer. Ghoul Jerix had known how to fight.

Against that ghoul, these Demon Creatures were far easier to handle.

'Take care of the unusual abilities and it's over.'

Even if telekinesis happened to catch him off guard, brute force could shake it off. Poison-coated claws just needed to be avoided.

Looking at things now, the nature of this Demon Creature pack was starting to make sense, not their nature so much as their purpose, which was plain enough.

'Chimeras made to drain stamina.'

Not rare natural variants, but something engineered through someone's personal research.

Enkrid stood over the bodies of the Demon Creatures he had killed, organized his thoughts in a quick review, and rolled his arms in loose circles.

A knight can cut down a thousand, they say.

But doing so requires conditions. Time is an absolute necessity, and there must be equipment to preserve stamina and avoid wasting Will on things that do not matter.

Who is going to helpfully die from a single sword swing?

A knight's inhuman combat ability is still bound by time.

Of course, if a knight's ability to manage stamina and control Will is exceptional, they can sustain a fight for an extraordinary length of time.

'But from that point on, it comes down to differences between knights.'

Some might sweep enemies away in a short burst, then rest and fight again. Others might pace themselves steadily, grinding down the enemy's numbers over a long stretch.

Regardless, when Enkrid checked his own condition, it was not perfect. There was something like grit lodged in the muscles here and there. He had been fighting while the rain soaked him through to his underclothes. The battle was still ongoing, and he had been putting in considerable effort himself.

So it was only natural for his body to feel this way.

Enkrid opened his eyes at the presence he sensed approaching from behind. For just a moment, the rain had thinned. Given that the clouds Alexandra had called dark rolling clouds were still just as thick overhead, it was probably temporary.

Opening his eyes meant the Medusa's curse would drain his Will, but a small welcome like this seemed worth extending. With that in mind, Enkrid looked at the approaching figure and said,

"You're late, Ragna."

"Did you know I would come?"

"I was hoping you would."

Honestly, he had figured that once the fight on the family head's side wrapped up, either he would go join them or Ragna would come to him.

Holding his ground and cutting down whatever came at him was not enough to feel satisfied with, not when there were still plenty of enemies left.

And Ragna was the kind of person who would get moving just to find something to direct his anger at.

Ragna drew closer and kept talking.

"Heskal got in the way."

"Got in the way?"

"I cut him down."

"Is that so?"

The family head, Alexandra, Lynox, all three of them, and Heskal too, none of them had known Ragna's true ability.

But Enkrid had a rough sense of it.

There was no way Heskal and a handful of Demon Creatures could stop Ragna.

"Heskal was no pushover, though, right?"

"I took a hole in the shoulder."

"The medicine Ann gave you?"

"The poison wasn't coated on it, at least."

Separate from the content of their words, both of them sounded so matter-of-fact that anyone watching would have thought it the calmest conversation in the world.

Around the two of them, several Demon Creatures circled at the edges, reading the situation and forming into position.

Enkrid's senses picked up a few new presences as well.

People with the ability to conceal their bodies and their presence. He had heard there were many like that in the hunters' village.

The hunters' village, he had been told, was a place formed by those who had come seeking the Zaun family's legacy and then lingered when they could not let go, gathering together over time.

Bounty hunters, mercenaries, people who lived by the sword, they had all gathered to form the village, surviving on whatever scraps fell from the Zaun table.

You could call it a place for outsiders who could not belong to Zaun.

Which made betrayal easy enough to expect.

Ching.

Enkrid slid Three-Iron back into its scabbard.

'A little more hard work ahead. Come on, Three-Iron.'

Honestly, Three-Iron was so good that he sometimes wondered if Aetri had deceived him and actually made it into an Inscribed Weapon, only claiming otherwise because he worried Enkrid would be disappointed.

The blade of true silver felt like it could cut through anything. The blade of hardest iron felt like it could smash through anything.

The feeling of the sword speaking to him every time he gripped it, that was not purely a product of Enkrid's own madness.

"Let's go."

He said it lightly. It would have been perfect if the rain stopped right then and a ray of dawn broke through, but naturally, nothing of the sort was going to happen.

The storm would not let up for at least three days.

There would be moments when it raged harder and moments when it eased, but the tempest blowing through right now was not yet done.

At those words, Ragna understood that his captain was looking at the same target he was.

Admiration slipped out before he could stop it.

"You saw the same thing I did? As expected, Captain has a true guide's talent. I guarantee it."

"...That's about as welcome as being told I remind someone of Rem."

"Pardon?"

Ragna tilted his head, clearly failing to understand.

"Shut up and follow. Time to show what two swordsmen can do."

Someone listening might have called it petty.

"What difference does it make, two swordsmen and one little girl?"

Those were the words Dmuel, the self-proclaimed god, had spoken, and Enkrid was still carrying them.

But Ragna could not call Enkrid petty for it. This was too obvious for that.

He had not forgotten those words either. Two swordsmen.

"Let's."

Ragna and Enkrid walked side by side. Their target, standing firm somewhere ahead of them, was a peerless beauty of the Cursed Ground with a rather distinctive way of wearing her hair in snakes.

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