A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 735

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 735: Brunhild, You're a Genius

= = =

A ceiling woven from branches, dried leaves, and hides covered the top of the dugout, which came up to waist height. Sunlight filtered in at an awkward angle, only half reaching inside.

'Where the ceiling is thick, it must be dark even at midday.'

People cannot live without light. So they would not stay cooped up inside all the time.

The structure itself was nothing like an ordinary house. Inside, there were separate spaces to hide, tunneled out like an ant colony.

Of course, Harkvent had not been kind enough to walk him through every corner and explain things. Enkrid had simply looked around once and seen what there was to see. Ruagarne's tactical swordsmanship trained you to take in your surroundings automatically.

Even if a fight broke out with the man in front of him, the environment was almost irrelevant, one gesture would be enough to kill him. But that was no reason to grow lazy about reading his surroundings.

The old saying came to mind: the sharpest blade that kills a knight is carelessness.

'A good hole to hide in.'

Not built for fighting. Built for surviving.

Deeper inside the sunken dugout, on a flat patch of ground, several kinds of plants had been set out to dry, but they had been left so long they had shriveled into husks. Along one wall, clay dishes sat in a neat row, unwiped and coated in dust. A table carved from wood stood in the corner.

There was a bed too, though Enkrid would have bet Krais's daily wage that whatever filled it was not quality straw.

"I don't have much to offer. It's a poor place here."

Enkrid read the anxiety and suspicion in Harkvent's eyes. Even so, the man did not come right out and tell him to leave.

Harkvent poured water into a clay cup and set it on the wooden table. The water was clear and tasted good.

'He's been settled in this area for a long time.'

The structure of the dwelling told him that much. This was not somewhere a person stopped for a few nights. It was a place lived in for years, a handful at the very least. Signs of hard-earned wisdom showed up everywhere.

The use of Nightmare Fruit was one. The half-finished traps scattered here and there were another.

The smell of dried hides and medicinal herbs reached him, and threaded through it was a sharp, unfamiliar scent he had never encountered before.

Three things had to be sorted for a person to live.

Food, clothing, shelter.

'Food comes from hunting and gathering.'

There were no signs of weaving anywhere, yet the clothes people wore were in decent shape.

'So there's a merchant outfit or a peddler who trades with this village alone.'

Peddlers who circled only the Hidden Village, skimming a profit off their isolation. Enkrid had run into that sort a few times before.

Harkvent exhaled in short bursts, each breath carrying what felt like the weight of long deliberation. His tension was plain to see.

He pressed his fist tight and asked, "Did you come from the south?"

Enkrid read the man's expression and played dumb. "I just happened to pass through. That's all."

Summer had arrived, but they were deep inside the Mountain Range, and cool wind blew morning and evening. Right now it was midday, and the semi-subterranean dwelling had grown quietly stuffy.

Sweat ran down Harkvent's forehead. Heat and nerves were working on him in tandem. Then he breathed out once more, long this time. A breath of release.

"Right. If you'd come from the south, you wouldn't have stopped to talk."

To put it plainly, these people were fugitives from the south, and Harkvent was the one who spoke for the village, something close to a headman.

Hidden Villages were, by their nature, mostly gatherings of people who had committed crimes or fled lords who bled them dry. Running to another city felt pointless since the people chasing them would probably never give up, and they did not have the knack for disappearing quietly into a city crowd.

For reasons like these, they took their chances living alongside Magic Beasts and Demon Creatures rather than thieves for neighbors.

Harkvent stroked his golden beard with one hand, combing it to the right several times. It looked like an old habit.

"Until the Magic Beasts started running wild like this, we were getting by."

The exhaustion on his face as he spoke ran deep.

Of the roughly fifty people here, half were women, children, and the elderly. They had never survived by force of arms to begin with.

'Traps and medicinal herbs.'

From what Harkvent had told him, the original plan had been to lure Magic Beasts inside and let them fall into a few pits to die.

The traps were crude, but.

'Against most Magic Beasts, they probably would have worked.'

Enkrid thought so too. Though having actually fought the pack now, his opinion had shifted.

This was a pack that used delaying actions. Even if they baited the beasts into a dwelling-shaped dugout, how many would actually fall for it?

The number that would blindly pile in and get buried alive would not be very high.

These people had other tricks too, traps and poisonous plants, but.

'Leave them alone and they all die.'

No need to rely on instinct or gut feeling. Just thinking back to that Panther Beast watching from a distance was enough.

Survival was far off for them.

Originally they had lived along the boundary between Demon Creature and Magic Beast territories. At some point the Magic Beasts had surged well past that line.

'The Magic Beast pack wiped out the Demon Creature pack.'

That was what the situation looked like. Not something that happened often.

"You can probably send your friends with the clubs back outside. Even if you knocked this place down, I'm not going to die."

"...I'm sorry about that. Everyone's just on edge."

The place Harkvent had called his home showed signs of habitation, though dust had settled on everything in a reasonable layer.

It had been a trap from the start. Even so, Enkrid had no intention of blaming them for it.

People living in hiding, how warmly could they welcome a stranger?

Enkrid dropped a few questions into the conversation out of pure curiosity.

For instance, whether they had planted themselves somewhere too dangerous. Harkvent's answer was that a few kinds of medicinal herbs grew behind the settlement and fetched a decent price.

As expected, a savvy peddler had set up trade with them. Through that peddler, they were saving up gold, and one day they planned to come down to the flatlands, hire mercenaries, and build a pioneer town. That was the dream.

A solid dream. The kind worth cheering on.

"Will you stay a few days?"

Asking for things was something Harkvent had rarely done in his life. Slavery was still very much alive in the south, and this man had been born into it. He had fled after losing his parents, or something along those lines.

Among the village's people, several had had their land stripped away by southern lords and come close to being enslaved themselves.

It was remarkable that they had made it this far and put down roots.

Looking at each life behind them one by one, a few books would not be enough to hold all their stories. How many crises had come before they finally settled? How much had weighed on them?

There was no need to hear each one to understand.

Even after Enkrid had driven out the Feral Dog Beasts, not a single person had cheered. A few had let out sighs of relief, but most kept their guard up.

Things like that came through naturally.

Through all that time, they had clawed to survive. Through all that time, there had rarely been anyone to ask for help and lean on.

"All right."

Enkrid nodded without a second thought.

"It's not a generous place."

Harkvent added it again, as if to be sure. Enkrid knew that well enough.

The shape of it was different and the people were different, but somehow it felt like coming home. The place where he had been born and raised had been something like this. It was not strange at all.

* * *

The place that had been a trap became Enkrid's lodging.

It also seemed that watching him cut down the Feral Dog Beasts had made an impression. A few children rolled their glass-bead eyes and let their curiosity show. One of them, a girl with soot on her face, walked straight up to him without preamble.

"Mister, how good are you at fighting?"

The girl's name was Brunhild. Without the soot she probably had very fair skin. Her eyes were large and her limbs were long and gangly.

If she grew up like this, she would be quite the beauty.

Enkrid had made himself a stump seat near the edge of the village and was sitting in the sun when she came up and said it.

On the surface he was enjoying the sunlight. Underneath, he was turning over the swordsmanship he had been organizing in his head. But he did not feel interrupted.

"A lot."

A question with no scale was hard to answer. The reply came out just as vague.

"Can you beat my father?"

She called Harkvent her father. Seeing six or more children like her and no wife in sight, it was easy enough to figure out that Brunhild was not Harkvent's blood daughter.

Harkvent had a sizable frame and muscle to match.

'On the continent, he could make a living with a sword.'

But he had stayed here. Responsibility, or maybe a sense of duty?

Without prying into the man's heart, there was no way to know.

Either way, as for answering the child's question, not even a thousand Harkvents could beat him. But his answer was short.

"Yes."

"You must be really good."

A child's world is small. All the more so for one who had grown up in a village with fewer than thirty houses.

Enkrid looked into the girl's eyes.

He had not expected anything special, and he had not decided to do anything for her.

So this was a kind of whim. Something to occupy himself while the tangled threads in his head refused to unravel cleanly.

"You use a spear?"

The crude thing in her hand was a spear if you called it one, a dull piece of metal at the end of a rough wooden rod, lashed on with sinew stripped from a Magic Beast.

"Yeah!"

Her eyes lit up.

She had warmed to him, and the wariness in her voice had thinned.

Enkrid's original plan had been to track down every trace of Magic Beasts and wipe them out, then leave. But he had not spotted any sign of them throughout the entire morning.

In terms of time, he had arrived yesterday, so this was the morning after his first full day. He had been quietly thinking of expanding his search range while organizing his thoughts on swordsmanship.

In the meantime, one small distraction seemed fine.

"Did anyone teach you how to use it?"

"There's nobody here who's good at teaching. But I do just fine on my own."

A child's confidence could put a smile on an adult's face. But there were not many people in this village with the spare room to smile at this girl.

She was at the age where love and recognition had not yet come to feel like separate things.

If showing her a small kindness could do something for her, would that mean something to him too?

He did not know. He just felt like it.

"Watch."

Brunhild gripped the crude spear with both hands.

What was unusual, if anything, was this: when you hold a spear shaft you typically set your hands wide apart. The girl's hands were close together. She held the shaft near the bottom rather than the middle, so lifting it was hard, and naturally the spear tip dragged along the ground.

"Can you block it?"

"Go ahead."

He would give her some encouragement and praise, let her put in a bit of effort, and then tell her to rest quietly. That was what he had in mind.

She was a child who could not handle even a single Feral Dog Beast if one came at her.

Brunhild gripped the butt end of the shaft and snapped her body sideways. Enkrid's pupils widened a fraction.

She pressed the shaft against her hip and moved it like she was cracking a whip. Before the motion even finished, he could already see where it was going.

Brunhild was going to swing the shaft properly. The tip would come in aimed directly at his stomach.

He waited a moment, and that was exactly what happened.

She needed enough force to bend the shaft, so she turned her whole body to build centripetal force, and through that force the spear tip came in clean.

It was the best attack possible given a body with too little strength and a weapon that was barely a weapon.

The shaft bending slightly was because her body was underfed and untrained. In other words, even though her strength was lacking, she had built a technique out of that very lack.

Pak.

Enkrid reached out and caught the shaft just below the tip. Whatever she threw at him, she posed no threat to him now.

"Wow. You caught it with one hand."

Her eyes shone even brighter than before.

He had seen Harkvent handle a spear too. But in terms of technique alone, this girl was above him.

'Born with it.'

No one had taught her. She had figured out how to use a spear on her own.

The ability to read distance with almost no practical experience and very little sparring.

The knack for moving the shaft. The instinct to use her own body.

"Brunhild, you're a genius."

Enkrid said the same words that had been said to him when he was young. They came out on their own, and with them came a strange sense of déjà vu, a feeling he could not quite name.

Then he remembered the trouble that had started with those words, and another line followed right after.

"Ah. Well. Take it with a grain of salt."

All of it had been reflex.

The shock Brunhild had given him was that real.

"Huh? I've never heard that before. Those words."

"Is that so?"

"Yeah."

There was no one around to say them.

In this small village, who would listen carefully to what this girl said, watch how she lived, and look after her?

There was no one like that.

And the thought that came with it:

'It's a person who wields the sword.'