WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 730: An Interesting Storyteller

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Enkrid did not refuse Valmund's proposal. The family head and the rest of them could not have stopped him anyway.

When someone's eyes were already lit up saying this is what he wanted, how could anyone talk him out of it?

So they did what they could.

"Ragna has gone to claim Ilchul. He'll need a few more days. At the longest, it could take another two weeks."

Tempest noticed that Enkrid wasn't particularly interested in what he'd just said. His eyes were already looking ahead.

Daring and challenge.

If you had to put names to that gaze, you could fit those two words, one to each eye.

It was like a furnace where the desire to learn and the hunger to grow were boiling over.

The preparations to leave had been finished long before. Watching Enkrid, that much was clear.

"You're really going on ahead?"

Ann stepped forward, someone who could be called yet another benefactor of his. She didn't look like she meant to stop him. She was just asking to make sure.

"Yeah. Bring Ragna with you when you come. Tell him to come alone and you won't be setting up house with him this lifetime."

"I know that already."

She wasn't smiling when she said it, which meant she was genuinely worried.

Jerky and dried fruit gathered from various hands, along with a few of Milestia's special potions, made their way into his pack.

"Here, take this."

Even the tightfisted Lynox coughed up one of his own relics. It was a rod, slightly longer than a shortsword. When swung through the air, there was a soft metallic chime and its length doubled, a spearhead emerging from the tip.

"It's a makeshift throwing spear. It has a penetrating spell on it, so it'll punch through most things. And it can do this too."

Lynox murmured the explanation. It was a fairly rare item, even so.

"I'll make good use of it."

Enkrid received it with his usual ease, stuck the rod at his hip, buckled on both swords, shouldered his pack, and turned to leave.

The navy cloak wrapped around him caught the eye, its surface etched with a stepped-line pattern.

"Going as just the two of you, is that all right? Say the word if you need anything. I'll come out to meet you."

Grida tossed those words at Enkrid's back.

"With a hole in your belly?"

"It's not like there's no one else in Zaun besides me. And who hasn't had a hole or two punched through them at this point?"

With Tempest watching, Enkrid waved the offer off.

Seeing him like that, trading something like banter with a friend, he looked ordinary at first glance.

But that couldn't be right.

He was far too striking to call ordinary. Black hair, blue eyes clear as a mountain lake, the navy cloak draped over all of it, the overall effect was like a painting. He was tall, with long limbs. His trained body and balanced stride gave those watching him a feeling of steadiness.

Any noblewoman of some standing would likely fall for him the moment she laid eyes on him.

And beyond that, there was something even stranger.

Tempest called out to stop Enkrid, who was about to leave without asking for anything and without saying a word.

"Why aren't you asking for anything?"

He had saved Zaun from ruin.

He had removed the threat hanging over Zaun.

Just two sword hands and one girl.

It wasn't as though those three had done everything.

But what would have happened without this man?

You didn't need any particular insight to see it.

It would have gone the way Heskal wanted, or else the way the Empire wanted, the Empire that had shown up late and was now pressing in with a greasy, ingratiating air.

An implicit alliance, though the weight sat more on "implicit" than on "alliance."

The Empire had always wanted to swallow Zaun whole.

But that was not what Zaun wanted.

Individuals who sought personal gain could leave if they liked, but Zaun as a whole did not want it.

The place that the Empire's hunting dog should have occupied had been filled instead by a man named Enkrid.

So Enkrid could have asked for something.

He could have brought Zaun's sword into his own hands. Even if it hadn't gone quite the way he wished, he could at least have made the attempt.

And yet Enkrid of the Border Guard, Ragna's close friend and commander, had asked for nothing.

Right. Every now and then, you did see people like this.

Those cut from a different cloth, who looked to the far future rather than the present and chose to leave the debt standing.

But even by that measure, the family head felt Enkrid was different. He hadn't even thought of leaving the debt there on purpose.

That was what baffled him most.

"What more would I ask for?"

Enkrid tilted his head, genuinely puzzled.

Even leaning on his cane because his leg troubled him, Tempest straightened his back and squared his shoulders.

"You saved Zaun."

No point dressing it up. He didn't have the knack for it anyway. Slipping meaning in sideways was not something he knew how to do.

This man understood the value of what he had done. He was sharp, and his mind was quick.

And still.

"I have already received more than enough."

That was all he said.

Was this impulse? Or a calculated move, laying groundwork to protect Zaun in the future?

He didn't know. Tempest set aside scheming and calculation and listened instead to the flame kindling in his chest.

These were words he had never once said aloud, because he was the family head.

"Should you ever call, Zaun will be at your side. Odinkar, you will see my oath through."

"Of course."

Odinkar, standing nearby, nodded without hesitation.

Perhaps it was because he had come to know Enkrid before his own family head had. Either way, he had no reservations.

Words are light things. There was no feeling behind them, that was simply how the family head was made.

But the meaning was anything but light. And Enkrid did not look surprised.

Just that? He gave a single look as if to say so, nodded, and turned away.

"Well then."

Watching him go, the family head spoke.

"For the hero who saved our house."

No one cheered. No one shed tears.

They simply drew their weapons.

Chung, chung, chung, chung, chiang.

Dozens of swords stood pointing at the sky and saw their hero off.

Clear sunlight, and the season when the greenery grew thick. It was summer.

* * *

It took Ragna two or three blinks before he understood that this place was not the real world.

Ilchul.

He had come here to claim the sword. Ilchul was both a heirloom and a relic passed down through the Zaun family across generations.

Its form was not fixed, and the name Ilchul itself sometimes changed.

That was what Ragna knew on his own.

Everything after that had come from his father.

"It's simple. Overcome the lingering will inside the sword and it becomes yours. Anyone unworthy who grabs it will be turned into an idiot."

"Is that so?"

Ragna showed not a trace of doubt or fear.

He hadn't asked what "worthy" meant, either.

The sword had been stored lying in a plain wooden box. It was rusted, with chips along the edge, nothing that looked like a treasured sword at all. That alone might have been its best security.

What thief would know this was something precious?

A sword that drove you mad if the wrong person grabbed it was even less likely to look like a treasured blade.

Right beside it, the sword Lynox had brought some time before, the one with a hilt forged entirely of true silver, looked twice as valuable.

"I swung it exactly twice. Back then, the sword's name was Ilmol."

Ragna turned that over in his mind, then looked ahead. In front of him stood three figures, men and women mixed.

One of them was a woman with hair so bright a red that it looked like flames were attached to her head. She smiled openly and spoke to him.

"These are lingering wills. Underestimate them and you die."

"We're short on time, so let's move quickly."

Ragna fired back without pause.

Later, while fighting, he also heard that these ones had once received help from a friend called Aker, but it went in one ear and out the other.

As for the threat that dragging it out would drain his body dry and kill it in the real world, he barely registered that at all.

"This one's something else."

Only the woman among the three said anything. She mentioned that it was because Aker hadn't properly taught them the technique, but that was none of Ragna's concern either.

What he wanted was the Inscribed Weapon, passed down through the family across generations, one that changed its form to match its owner's Will.

"Don't you have any respect for your ancestors, you little punk?"

So when he heard that, he simply brushed it aside and kept swinging his greatsword.

He had watched someone at his side break through every limit they hit and keep going.

I can do it too.

He had to fight all three at once.

But this was nothing.

Those who want to give up look for excuses. Those who believe they can look for a way.

Ragna did the latter. He fought on with conviction and stubbornness.

Everyone figured it would take at least two weeks. Ragna woke up in three days.

"He left ahead of me?"

He heard that Enkrid had already gone, but he wasn't flustered.

At first glance, Enkrid seemed like someone who calculated everything and weighed every angle before moving, but Ragna had watched him long enough to understand part of what the man actually was.

He just moved however he felt like.

So it wasn't much of a surprise.

The ones who were surprised, in that moment, were everyone except Ragna.

He stepped out with a heavy greatsword in hand. He had not become an idiot.

"Wasn't Ilchul a longsword?"

Odinkar tilted his head. Most of the others had thought the same.

"When it accepts its owner, it can change form."

The family head answered. You could tell how surprised he was if you looked closely, his eyes were open just the tiniest bit wider than usual.

Only someone who shared a bed with him, like Alexandra, would have noticed the difference.

* * *

"The point is Circulation. Circulation."

When Enkrid said he was leaving alone with the Imperial Knight Valmund Balpier, everyone had been displeased.

For all that, the journey itself was turning out to be quite enjoyable.

"Circulation. A junior knight clothes Will in intent and refines it into technique. Then, once a knight reaches a certain level, they start using Will naturally. And to go beyond that naturalness, to truly master Will, you pour intent back into it again."

It sounded like talk of clouds and mist, but Enkrid had lived it in his own body, so he grasped it at once.

Explosion of Will, Restraint, all of those were the result of naturally weaving intent into Will and releasing it.

The change in Will's nature.

That had been Enkrid's next task, and it turned out he had already cleared it without quite realizing it.

That was also why, when Tempest Zaun had said what he said, Enkrid had answered that he'd already received more than enough.

Zaun had taught him freely and generously, and that had been more than satisfying.

I learned a great deal.

Still the same thought.

Not making demands of people just because he'd helped them was natural to Enkrid, nothing more.

On top of that, pushing Zaun out of its own place in the world would have meant Zaun was no longer Zaun from that moment on.

Zaun could dedicate itself to training precisely because it was isolated.

That was how it had become the Zaun of today.

Endless practice, eating and sleeping and waking each day to do nothing but swing a sword. A group like that.

Because it was isolated, it was never pulled into other interests. Seen that way, the three villages were something like Zaun's armor.

They handled the outside world while Zaun focused on its training. A simple structure.

For a single small faction, it was probably the strongest one there was.

Valmund knew a great many things, and he kept talking through them one after another.

Moving at a brisk pace over a long stretch, a moderate sweat had gathered on both of them. They had agreed to keep going without rest while the sun was up.

They followed narrow paths cut through the woods, climbed slopes and descended others, and at one point leaped across a stream.

Two people with physical abilities beyond the human scale had no trouble clearing a waterway wide enough for three or four people to lie across.

Right after one such crossing, walking a relatively flat downhill stretch, Valmund said it.

"Do you know why Tempest Zaun and Lynox dislike me?"

"No."

"Simple. I don't care what methods I use as long as I win."

Means and methods meant different things to different people.

Enkrid, for instance, using the environment and provoking opponents could also be called not caring what methods he used.

But Zaun was not the type to grumble over something like that.

They studied tactics and enjoyed fighting, too.

What Valmund was describing was probably a different reason. Something dirtier than that.

"I have nothing to be ashamed of. What's wrong with digging into someone's weakness?"

And Enkrid's capacity was broad enough that he had no real reason to condemn him.

Even if the method was a bit rough and made him want to frown, he could accept it.

They pushed through a stretch of dense undergrowth, crossed ground torn up as if by a landslide, and emerged with boots coated in mud before the slope finally leveled out and a flat path opened ahead.

Along the way, Demon Creatures had appeared here and there, but nothing stupid enough to charge at the two of them could slow either of them down for even a moment.

Each time, Enkrid watched Valmund's technique carefully.

Valmund did not even draw his weapon. He used the steel bracer wrapped around his hand to smash the Demon Creatures' skulls.

A boar Magic Beast, larger than a Giant, the kind you had to look up at even though it ran on four legs, came charging in, and Valmund spun casually to the side and crushed its head with the back of his hand.

The boar Magic Beast staggered a few more steps with its skull caved in, then rolled across the ground.

After that came a pack of drowned corpses that had crawled out thanks to several days of heavy rain, and still Valmund did not draw his weapon.

It wasn't a competition, but Enkrid had also been absorbed lately in building a new sword technique, so he killed them barehanded too.

"I heard the Demon Creatures were fighting in formation."

Valmund said that while killing a few more.

"They were organized enough to make you wonder who trained them."

"That's nothing special. Get close to the Cursed Ground and you'll see it often enough. It's been showing up more and more over the past few years."

The Cursed Ground.

Enkrid settled into listening, and Valmund kept going.

"Just as humans steal techniques from Demon Creatures and learn them, I think the time has come for Demon Creatures to start learning human systems in return. Both sides have picked up what there is to pick up from each other."

There were several reasons Enkrid kept finding this enjoyable. One was the faint, underlying tension that came from being just the two of them.

The second was that what Valmund brought out was not the kind of talk you could hear anywhere else.

Enkrid was the sort of person who used to spend his last few Krona buying a traveling bard's stories.

He had a soft spot for a good tale.

"What have they learned?"

"You didn't know? Pressure originally came from Demon Creatures. No, you'd have to say that Will itself was something learned by watching Demon Creatures."

In Enkrid's eyes, the Imperial Knight Valmund was an interesting storyteller.

Even now, he was spinning out stories that made your ears perk up on their own.

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