WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 734: The Semi-Basement

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"Hold them. Hold them."

It was right after he spotted the village. Enkrid's sharp ears caught the sound of human voices.

He could not just walk past. Curiosity pulled at him, and something else did too.

After all, was this not a moment that reminded him of where he had once lived?

Cutting through the brush would take longer than climbing up and using the branches as footholds, so that was what he did.

He had a pack on his back and two swords at his hip, which meant his body was hardly light, but climbing a single tree was nothing.

Enkrid drove his fingers into the bark and launched himself upward.

Fingers in, weight on his toes, he scaled the trunk. Quicker than a squirrel.

For a knight, this was the bare minimum.

He leaped from branch to branch in the direction of the voices. Closing the distance took no time at all.

Each time he kicked off a branch, leaves rained down, and the mountain birds roosting nearby startled and burst away with a frantic flutter of wings.

"If they break through, we die. We hold here."

Fear threaded through the shout.

Enkrid located the source and stopped.

His right foot rested on a thin branch, two fingers pressed into the bark, his left toes dug in just enough to hold. He had climbed up to move faster, but by accident he had gotten a bird's-eye view of the whole situation.

Lash a sharpened piece of metal to the end of a stick and you have a spear. More than ten people held ones they had made exactly that way. Behind them were others working slings, and further back still, people had arrows drawn.

A sloppy formation.

Roughly speaking, the spear-carriers were up front, the sling-users in the middle, the archers at the rear, but calling it a formation was generous. They were just bunched together.

The gaps between the spear-carriers in particular were far too wide.

Fight like that and the Feral Dog Beasts would punch straight through at the first charge, leaving everyone in the back to face the pack alone.

These were not people with proper combat training. Their total numbers did not even reach fifty.

Across from them, a comparable number of Feral Dog Beasts had fanned out in a broad line.

Thin.

The numbers, the people who had stepped up to fight, all of it looked thin.

Even so, if it came to blows, they would not all die. He judged the human side to have the advantage.

But people will die.

If luck ran out, more than half of them would.

They seemed to know that too. Several were clenching their teeth hard. The ones out front with their improvised spears especially.

After sweeping the situation with his eyes, Enkrid found nothing worth deliberating over, so he did not bother.

He simply lifted his foot off the branch and dropped.

An ordinary person would have broken something jumping from that height. Naturally, that was not a concern.

Before he hit the ground, Enkrid drew the Three-Iron and drove it into the trunk of a nearby tree.

Scrrrk.

He left a long scar in the wood and touched down with a thud.

A noisy entrance drew every eye in the area.

The people and the dogs alike all fixed their attention on him. Enkrid absorbed the stares without a second thought and sprinted forward.

A knight's charge is difficult for ordinary eyes to follow, even when it is not all-out.

And Enkrid's physical conditioning far outstripped an ordinary knight's.

Strong Legs blended body and Will together, after all.

It was no surprise that he seemed to vanish.

Boom.

A sound like something splitting open in the earth, and no afterimage left behind.

Even running full tilt, Enkrid had room to spare. He could watch the Feral Dog Beasts' unnaturally overdeveloped shoulder muscles and their fangs one by one, tracking their reactions, and still have attention left over.

He could have let his mind drift a little, if he had wanted to.

The opponent was a Magic Beast, which meant this was real combat. No need to hold back the way he did in practice.

Enkrid and the pack moved through different measures of time.

The Zaun family had not had a scabbard that fit the Three-Iron properly, so it was secured inside a slightly oversized one with a leather cord. He yanked it free in one motion and swung upward.

Snap. The cord broke. Only Enkrid heard it.

A wet cutting sound, then the heavy rush of blood and viscera hitting the ground. He was the only one who heard those too.

Drawing the Three-Iron, he sliced from chest to skull, then broke the rhythm into short chopping strikes, repeating the combination.

Thud, thud, thud, thud.

The sounds chased after his blade. Enkrid's sword split the heads of the Feral Dog Beasts faster than sound could follow.

A woodcutter who had spent a lifetime splitting logs could not have done it with more ease or more precision.

What was inside the Magic Beasts' skulls shot straight up. Black blood, cracked bone, gray matter, shattered brain fragments that made you wonder if any thinking had ever gone on inside them. It looked like a fountain built out of Feral Dog Beasts.

From where the people were watching, what they saw was this: a figure dropped from a tree, vanished, the earth erupted, and the Magic Beasts fell with their heads split open.

What on earth.

Some let the force bleed from their arms without realizing it, slowly lowering their spear tips. Others went the opposite direction and locked up tight with tension.

Twang.

One woman was so startled she loosed an arrow into the ground five steps in front of her.

"Oh."

A short gasp, barely a word. There was no other way to express what they were feeling.

Enkrid swung the Three-Iron in a wide arc to fling off the flesh and fat clinging to the blade.

Patter, patter.

Chunks of meat and clotted blood scattered to one side.

Beasts naturally have sharper Dynamic Visual Acuity and better physical ability than people. When a beast's blood becomes tainted with demon ichor and it becomes a Magic Beast, that physical ability climbs further still.

Not that it compared to a knight.

Magic Beasts were not all the same, though. Just as some people are exceptional, sometimes a wild beast could be more dangerous than a Magic Beast, and sometimes a Magic Beast came out weaker than an ordinary animal.

Odd-Eye was proof enough of that. A single wild horse had fought off demon ichor and stood on its own will.

Even among the Feral Dog Beasts, there was one that was fast and had real courage.

It had watched its packmates' heads burst open one after another and reacted. Back legs pushed off the ground and it launched forward.

That human was busy killing the others.

Its position, as luck would have it, gave it a clear view of the human's back.

It moved differently from the rest of the pack. Had it survived, it might have earned a name. It was that kind of individual.

Without shifting his torso, Enkrid forced the sword he had been chopping with against its own momentum and changed direction.

One foot as the pivot, his waist turned, and the blade drew a horizontal line.

Huff. Thunk.

The arc the Three-Iron traced cut straight through the beast's neck. The severed head hung in the air for a moment with a dull sound before it fell.

Snap, snap.

The beast's jaws bit at empty air, not yet knowing it was dead.

Enkrid's blade cut even the worst of Demon Creatures. No matter how exceptional this Magic Beast was, set against that, it was no different from a chick that had just cracked out of its shell.

A Magic Beast facing death had two choices: scatter and run, or give in to its feral nature and charge.

The pack chose neither.

Enkrid, after his initial charge, had not moved far from one spot. He just kept cutting and breaking the Magic Beasts as they came.

Amid that, several of the Feral Dog Beasts turned away from him and circled around. They were going for the people behind him, not for Enkrid.

He swung the Three-Iron and reached for the throwing spear he had received from Lynox, then whipped it downward.

Tang.

He had swung so hard that the sound of the spearhead locking into place rang out clear and bright.

He threw it without breaking stride.

Fwwwwsh. Boom.

The throwing spear flew and caved in the skull of the beast that had been sneaking around behind him, then buried itself at an angle in the dirt.

The broken skull sprayed gray matter and bone fragments in every direction.

The pack then did something that made no sense. Scattering and running was understandable, but this,

A rear guard? A delaying action?

Even operating on pure instinct, Enkrid had studied basic strategy at some point. He had learned it during a period when he had tried everything just to survive.

Part of the pack fled. The rest stayed and charged.

Their packmates' bodies were piled around them, and still there was no hesitation in those black eyes.

Neither was there any in Enkrid's blade.

The Three-Iron sliced low to high, thrust, then cut again, turning each beast that came at him into a mound of meat too ruined to eat.

Magic Beast flesh is tough and poisonous by nature.

Enkrid watched the last of the Feral Dog Beasts scatter, then let his gaze travel far. The pupils that had been tracking close range contracted, then widened. That was what happened when he pushed Will through his eyes to see at a distance.

A spotted dog in the distance? No, a leopard.

Whatever it was, it was three times the size of an ordinary Feral Dog Beast, and it was watching him from far away.

Outside the reach of his senses.

Another pack of Magic Beasts came into view at that distance, but they were too far to pursue.

There had also been another reason he had not chased the fleeing dogs moments ago. If he had left the ones still fighting and moved to deal with the far group, the people behind him would have had to handle the remaining pack. That would have meant unnecessary casualties.

These people had been stunned and frozen by what they witnessed. Their reactions would have been slow.

And the pack had already been ready to fight.

Several things were strange.

Had that last group of Feral Dog Beasts not looked exactly like a unit running a delaying action to cover a retreat?

Even the ones that fled had not simply bolted in every direction. They pulled back in sequence.

Even running a sacrificial rear guard?

A unit that fights to buy time for a retreat is often called exactly that.

Coincidence? No. He doubted it.

His instincts were telling him so.

None of this was something to dwell on right now, though.

Enkrid finished shaking the fat and blood from the Three-Iron and grabbed a fistful of dirt to wipe the blade down roughly.

He had swung it quite hard, so he would need to oil it properly later.

He had left Zaun with a full bottle of quality linseed oil. That would do.

"Who are you?"

Only then did a voice reach him with the question. Saying he was Enkrid of the Border Guard would mean nothing to anyone here.

"Call me a wandering swordsman."

"...We are grateful for your help."

The one who had been at the front, holding a spear, spoke first, but the tension was plain. He could not blame them.

If a knight showed up without warning at a village of people living in hiding, anyone would be frightened.

The weak are always on edge in this world. If someone with power suddenly turned ill-intentioned, there was little these people could do.

Not one person there was blinking naturally. Every eye was wide open, fixed on the fighter who had cut through the Magic Beasts, unable to look away.

Enkrid sheathed the Three-Iron in its oversized scabbard and looped the broken leather cord back through to tie it again.

Normally he would have just left, but something nagged at him.

No, to be more honest about it.

He kept thinking of all the people he had failed to save before. Among them was an entire village.

And this place looked too much like where he had once lived.

A slight detour, he told himself.

Looking at what had just happened, if he left now, the people in front of him would all be dead before long.

That was usually how it ended for people living like this.

He had heard somewhere that there was an underground city built by groups like them banding together, but most hidden villages ended up as a single meal for Demon Creatures or Magic Beasts.

Some people even argued that these communities were the reason Demon Creatures built Colonies, that when people gathered like this and became food en masse, it made the creatures' numbers swell.

Whatever the case, Enkrid could not turn away from them.

"Since I helped, would you mind if I rested here a while?"

He asked, and not one person was quick to answer. The spear-carrier who had stepped forward did not raise his spear tip, but the wariness was plain.

This appeared to be one of those hidden villages made up of people who shut out outsiders.

The man at the front, the one with the heavy eyebrows, worked his lips a few times before speaking.

"...This way."

He had clearly wrestled with it.

Enkrid put his sword away and began walking at an unhurried pace. He did not want to come across as threatening to these people.

The entrance to the village was not visible. These were not settlers. Clearing the land was not what they were here for.

They had gathered purely to survive.

Because of that, they had built their homes in an unusual way.

They had dug pits in the ground and covered the tops with brush, something like low-thatched lids, and over those they had crushed Nightmare Fruit Seeds and scattered them around to keep Magic Beasts and Demon Creatures away.

Enkrid had done the same thing himself on the way here, using the berries as a workaround.

Proper use.

Handle Nightmare Fruit carelessly and your fingertips would rot. Even if you were luckier than that, breathe the scent in the wrong way and you would be seeing hallucinations for a week, conservatively.

There was a reason the plant was called Nightmare Fruit.

It produced a smell that Demon Creatures, Magic Beasts, and ordinary animals disliked, but to use it properly you had to mix the fruit and its seeds in the right proportion.

Exactly as these people had done.

"Harkvent."

The man leading the way said his name. A southern name.

"Enkrid."

"Good to meet you."

He said it in a tone that suggested the opposite entirely, and led him into a place that was half pit, half surface.

Semi-underground, Enkrid thought. That seemed about right.

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