WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 736: That Certain Someone

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When gripping the shaft wide and thrusting, what should the footwork look like?

Brunhild knew the answer without being asked.

"Why did you shift your feet?"

Enkrid asked every time it happened, and Brunhild would plant the shaft like a walking stick and sink into thought.

In a way, it might have looked a little ridiculous. One person swinging a spear however she liked, the other asking why.

Could this even be called teaching?

But it was working.

Her ability to pick things up is something else.

On top of that, not a trace of laziness. If that counted as talent, then yes, it was one, a talent separate from everything else she already had. Knowing how to enjoy something even when tired.

Brunhild was doing nothing more than swinging a spear, and her eyes still lit up with every repetition.

"How many times am I supposed to do this?"

"A hundred a day."

Simple thrusts and shaft drills, and she smiled and said yes without a word of complaint.

Enkrid had spent most of his life with a sword in hand, but he had held a spear often enough. So he kept his focus on pointing her toward the fundamentals he knew, repeating them until they stuck, and passed along whatever insight he had gathered through questions and answers.

What matters is how you use your strength.

It would not matter what she held in her hands. The difference would be negligible.

She can handle the Basics herself.

What this girl needed was the knack for it. Simply put, what Enkrid was doing now was planting signposts along the road Brunhild would have to walk later.

He snapped a branch off a tree, stripped the smaller twigs, and swung it like a wooden practice sword. Brunhild whooped and swung her spear with full enthusiasm.

Enkrid spent half the day like that.

Still, something feels missing.

Brunhild had exceptional talent, but she kept skipping the middle steps. Right now it did not look like a problem, but,

Better she understands it properly before moving on.

That would need a little more thought. He could not exactly sit down and write a swordsmanship manual before leaving.

That would mean staying in this village for half a year.

That's not happening.

The original plan was simply to deal with the threat. No matter how fierce a Magic Beast was, if one showed itself, there would be no problem waiting for that moment.

Cutting down the number of Magic Beasts should be enough.

That was the kind of thing worth doing now that he was a knight. If those beasts showed themselves, he could chase their tails for two nights straight, slashing and stabbing until they were dead.

There were no signs of Magic Beasts at the moment, but if he went out looking with purpose, he would find something. It would not take long.

Enkrid was not an exceptional hunter, but he was not blind either.

Mountain trails were easy to lose, but with a clear base camp and as long as he did not stray too far from it, getting lost was not a concern.

Not like I'm Ragna.

The Magic Beast problem tormenting Harkvent was nothing he could not handle.

Before he knew it, the sun had started sinking toward the horizon. Days were short in the mountains. That was only natural if you were not living up on a high plateau like Zaun.

The surrounding Mountain Range swallowed the sunlight fast, and shadow fell long across the ground. Brunhild's silhouette stretched out thin.

"Heh."

The girl was still smiling, still swinging her spear, and behind her the evening sky burned orange. That warm touch swept over her, swept over him, and ran its hand across the whole village as it passed.

Looked at a certain way, it was gentle light, full of warmth.

The kind of light that gathered up all those who had endured each day, one by one, just to reach today.

Among it, visions surfaced. The faces of those he had failed to save, those who had died, clear as day before him.

Shadows that would not fade no matter how many todays he repeated.

Some stains could never be scrubbed out. Some scars faded but kept their shape.

Please, help us.

He had staked his life on that one plea and failed. Enkrid had not saved anyone.

Someone, anyone has to save us. This isn't right. It's not fair.

A village of sinners, they had called it. A father whose daughter was taken, who tried to kill the lord, failed, and became a fugitive.

Others who had lost everything because they could not pay the registration fee to stay in the city.

Through that orange sunset, a jumble of memories tore through his mind.

Across countless days he had imagined it. If someone had reached out in that moment, would things have been different?

That someone.

No swell of pride rose in his chest, but something small stirred along his skin, a faint tremor moving through his whole body.

Enkrid had become, across more time than he could count, the someone he had always imagined at that moment.

From within the visions, a woman with a neat braid and an apron stepped forward and spoke.

"You think I'd hold any resentment? If not for you, no one would have stepped in at all. So put that weight down and live. That's allowed. You've done enough."

A tender ache flared into something sharp, struck his heart, and climbed all the way to his face. There was no reason to hold it back, so Enkrid let the tears fall.

It did not carry any particular significance. He was simply letting the feeling pass through.

"Hah!"

Right beside him, the girl swung her spear shaft.

If that girl grew up like this, she might one day become someone else's someone. That thought came to him.

* * *

The Feral Dog Beast attacks had left Harkvent so sleep-deprived that the skin beneath his eyes had gone dark. Dread and worry were eating him alive.

If we go into the city like this.

They would have to move into the slums.

Was that right?

Better than all dying, maybe.

What was the correct answer?

Harkvent knew there were no correct answers in life. That was one of the things forty-odd years of living had taught him.

But is that kind of life even right?

Spend fifty years as a slave?

Or live five years as a human being?

If they held this village and died defending it, they would die with hope.

If we go down to the city to survive.

They would live with despair. No different from being slaves again.

Just getting through the Mountain Range and descending was no ordinary feat.

Could they save even half?

"Urgh."

The pressure crushing his mind squeezed into his body and brought up nausea. He had eaten nothing, so only a thin stream of bile came up.

His throat burned. His eyes burned, and his ears and nose burned too.

He felt like a hunk of meat shoved into a steamer.

"Hff."

He let out a long breath, steadied himself, and lifted his head. The sky was fading.

Looking at it, the image of the outsider surfaced in his mind. Black hair, a face you could never forget after seeing it once.

The man had killed a Magic Beast in a single move. Was that swordsman this village's savior?

But if not, what did he want? If the swordsman killed the beasts and then made demands, was there anything left to give?

What if he asks for my daughter?

Should he hand her over? If giving one person away meant saving everyone else, was that the right thing to do?

It was agonizing. He knew it might be what was required, and he knew he could not do it.

No. It would not come to that. Harkvent understood one of the world's truths. Salvation had to be earned by your own hand. No one could save another person in their place.

"Don't carry this alone, Harven."

An elder of more than sixty years walked over and spoke. His back was bent and his eyes were clouded with white cataracts.

"Everyone will make their own choices and live by them. Haven't we all lived that way until now?"

"...I know."

"If that swordsman asks for something unreasonable, we'll fight until the last one of us is standing."

The old man had read his worries and spoken to them.

"The beasts have to be dealt with first."

That was the order of things. The night sky after the sunset died was pitch black. As if two moons and a scatter of stars disliked that blackness, they competed to outshine it.

Harkvent had no room left in him to enjoy beauty, so none of that light reached his eyes.

His mind was full of dread at a crisis that had come too soon.

And then he heard the sound of something striking that dread like a bell. Naturally, it was not a clear and pleasant ring.

Boom. Crack.

Harkvent's village was a small basin ringed by ancient trees. Seen from above, it would have looked like a neat little circle hidden cleverly inside the mountains, with dwellings clustered close together.

One of those ancient trees, a natural barrier that heaven itself had placed around them, snapped with a sound like a thunderclap.

"Bear!"

Someone shouted it. Harkvent recognized the voice as Jeri's. Keen eyes and ears, knew how to make bows and arrows, a capable friend.

The Magic Beasts had been acting strangely lately, so several traps had been set along the outer edges and someone had been keeping watch. He was not the only one losing sleep over it, and Jeri had been among those standing guard.

Harkvent grabbed the spear he had leaned against the semi-underground dwelling and sprinted out.

"If it's a Bear Beast you'll get yourself killed! Everyone has to hide!"

The elder let out a shout that did not suit his age at all.

Hiding was not a solution.

Harkvent knew it in his gut.

He ran hard and reached the source of the sound, and what he saw there stopped him cold.

The thing stood on two legs and the sheer presence of it was unlike anything else. People said things were as big as a house, and this one truly was, three times the size of a man.

And that massive body was spraying black blood in every direction.

To be precise, what he saw was a Magic Beast with its neck half-severed, still swinging its claws.

In front of it stood a man stopping those claws with his bare hand.

Should he rub his eyes? Was he actually seeing this?

Well, a question like that was understandable enough.

Harkvent had never seen a knight. In truth, it was common to go a whole lifetime without ever seeing one.

As the continental balance shifted and groups of hidden strength began to raise their heads, those on the battlefield had started to feel the presence of knights in their bones. But this was the Hidden Village. Most of its people had no idea what was happening on the continent.

So naturally, this was a sight beyond imagination.

The speed that had cut down the Feral Dog Beasts had already left him astonished. This was something beyond even that.

The Feral Dog Beasts were enemies they could manage, somehow, with some effort.

But a Bear Beast? One the size of a house at that?

* * *

Before anyone shouted bear. Before the tree even fell.

Enkrid woke with a grim instinct, sat straight up, and stepped lightly off the bed. The only things he had to put on beyond his clothes were a pair of cloth gauntlets.

He did not have time to pull those on, so he went out with nothing but Three-Iron in hand.

He slapped the Magic Beast hide stretched over the entrance and it snapped open with a thwack. Outside, a faint rank smell hit him.

If there was a smell, finding the direction was simple. He sharpened his senses and caught the sounds of cracking and splintering branches.

Something large was moving, getting closer.

Its presence was unmistakable. Enkrid was already moving toward it when a thud rang out, and someone who had caught a glimpse by moonlight shouted that it was a bear.

A massive body lurching out of pitch-black darkness would turn anyone's legs to water just at the sight of it.

For a normal person, that was.

Enkrid sprinted forward and grabbed the man who had been standing there mid-shout by the back of the neck.

The man had frozen solid the moment he yelled.

A predator was a predator, and a predator that had become a Magic Beast could paralyze a person just by being seen.

That was also the basic principle behind the Pressure that Demon Creatures wielded.

The prey's fear locking its own body in place.

The beginning of the Will of Refusal.

The thought came to him as he ran. A stray thought like that was fine. He had rushed out, but once he arrived and saw the situation, he had room to breathe.

That breathing room came from being quick enough to rush out in the first place.

Enkrid yanked the man backward by the scruff of his neck and tossed him. The man's feet left the ground.

"Uh, wha, uh."

The man could not even scream properly. He was still hitting the ground when the Bear Beast closed the gap and raked its claws.

Separate from its size, it was blindingly fast. It had been aiming for the man, but it shifted direction toward Enkrid the moment it saw him move, which meant it had judgment too.

Enkrid angled Three-Iron upward at a slant.

Three-Iron's blade against those claws looked like a child's forearm braced against an axe swung by a Giant, but that forearm threw the Giant's axe aside without effort.

Clang.

The claws are thick.

Moonlight was bright enough. Hard to see was not how Enkrid would have described it. Not quite daylight, but enough to make out the shape of the Magic Beast that had surged out of the dark.

One eye is missing.

An old scar ran across where the eye had been, and across its chest a patch of fur curved in a crescent shape, a different color from the rest.

Turning into a Magic Beast had doubled its strength and hardened its claws to something close to steel.

A few other details about the beast passed through his mind, but he brushed them aside.

He was still in the process of adapting to Ruagarne's tactical swordsmanship, so he had started treating everything he noticed as information, but ignoring what was unnecessary was just as important. Otherwise he would overload.

So Enkrid did that. Filtered out what he did not need.

He deflected the downswing with Three-Iron's hardest-iron edge and followed it immediately with a cut to the neck. The blade drew two arcs through the air, one to deflect, a second to open the throat.

Thud.

Black blood sprayed wide and the beast let out a long guttural roar. Less a roar than a scream packed with pain.

Even so, it reached with its other hand.

That's useful information.

Becoming a Magic Beast had given it tenacious vitality. The severed vessels in its neck were already tangling together, starting to regenerate.

And it was hostile enough to keep attacking through the pain.

He stopped the bear's other swinging hand with his bare fist on purpose. That freed the hand holding Three-Iron.

The Bear Beast fought back to the end. Jaws wide open, neck flopping, it tried to bite down on Enkrid's head.

Ferocity that pushed past the range of insight.

Surprised me.

In that brief instant, Enkrid thought it through and activated the Sword of Chance, moving as though even this had been planned.

Three-Iron was drawing a straight vertical line when it shifted into a curve and punched through the bear's cheek horizontally, stopping it dead.

Thunk. Crunch.

The beast bit down on Three-Iron, and Enkrid pulled the hand that had struck its face back while stepping his right foot forward.

In an instant he had switched to a left-handed stance.

From that stance, the right hand gripping Three-Iron pulled back as his left fist swung out.

The head of the beast with the blade clenched in its jaws came right into striking range at the same moment as Enkrid's ankle and waist rotated.

The left hand driving forward carried the joint technique of Valaf Martial Arts blended with the Heavy Sword Style's single strike he had learned from watching Ragna.

A fist loaded with Will struck the bear's skull.

Crack.

The bear's head burst and debris spread to one side. Enkrid shook his hand clean in the air.

Without the gauntlet on, it looked like the black matter had gotten under his nails too.

He looked forward. The Bear Beast was dead, but the rank smell still jabbed at his nose.

In the darkness, two Panther Beasts were watching him. Close enough to catch on foot if he ran.

His intent moved, and his body responded.

With a whump, dirt kicked up from Enkrid's boot heels as he launched forward.

Three-Iron caught the moonlight, drawing a long bright line as it drove toward the two Panther Beasts.

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