WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 741: A Bold and Audacious Dream

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The Magic Beasts kept changing their approach, attacking again and again. Sometimes once every two days, then once every three.

A few nimble Fox Beasts made a wide loop around the village and tried to hide themselves along the path to the lake, but they couldn't fool Enkrid's senses. More than anything, it fell within the range of what he had anticipated.

If Magic Beasts have learned human cunning.

Then he only needed to factor that in and prepare for it too.

"How do you anticipate all of this and prepare for it?" Eirik asked at one point.

Since he was at it anyway, Enkrid explained a few things to the girl in front of him. She asked where east was and he told her the sea lay that way, and she listened with sharp focus. Her ears seemed almost perked up, and she blinked far less than usual. A posture of genuine attention.

"Even if you don't need it right now, it's good to have at least a minimum of fighting ability. It might become your fangs, or it might be the last resort that saves you from danger."

The stranger who had stumbled into their lives by chance was no ordinary person.

What Enkrid said was rooted in how Krais thought about things.

The very first thing Krais had said after barely surviving a certain incident was exactly that.

"And if you can get a set of abs that'll keep a woman's eyes lingering, all the better."

What followed wasn't worth passing along, so he left it out.

"That said, you can't go killing dozens of Magic Beasts right now, but still, build up your strength. When you work the body, this works better too."

He said it while tapping his right temple with his index finger.

He layered his own thoughts onto Krais's and shared what he had lived through himself.

People would call this teaching, education.

After setting up the defense against the Magic Beast attacks, he had only drilled them on holding formation. For Brunhild he laid out fighting techniques, tricks, and training methods; with Eirik he mostly just talked. Those conversations were like a secret manual on swordsmanship for her.

"It's not that I know everything and prepare for it. It's that I prepare for everything I can predict."

Some people might tilt their heads at that, but not Eirik.

"Ah."

A short sound of understanding.

Krais was always anxious, and to quiet that anxiety he prepared for everything.

Applied to this village, that meant: narrow the perimeter to defend, and gather every available resource.

Under normal circumstances they would have needed to guard the food stockpiled in the storehouse, protect the path to the lake, and prepare for Magic Beasts targeting the children and the elderly. Right now, none of that was necessary.

Reducing needs and preparing for everything within reach.

That was what could truly be called Krais's style of tactics.

Enkrid had copied it and put it into practice. Rather than relying only on instinct, he took active preemptive measures. He didn't hesitate to use his head.

And so the villagers lifted spears and fought the Magic Beasts.

Enkrid sat up in a tree and watched as they thrust their spears with their lives on the line.

"If the line breaks!"

"We die!"

They were calling out to each other, working out their own chants, nothing Enkrid had taught them.

"If it gets too hard, don't hold on, pull back!"

Repetition builds instinct. If one of the ten starts to lag, pull them to the rear. The circle still holds with nine. Those who have stepped out are looked after by the ones not fighting.

Two villagers with a knack for the bow stood braced at the center of the circle as well.

They had volunteered after nearly having a shoulder torn out by an Owl Beast two nights before.

A thick-armed woman kept glancing overhead.

If an owl could come for them, crows might too, she wasn't letting her guard down just because it was daytime.

Not predicting the Magic Beasts' moves, but doing their best in a fight of defending and holding out. Enkrid's teaching had taken shape and become real.

"Don't you dare fall back when it gets hard! Hold the line!"

Someone had even been chosen as squad leader among them.

There were moments when a Magic Beast tried to pry apart a gap in the formation.

"Not a chance."

Brunhild stopped it.

Natural talent blazed. The spear tip split the sunlight and drove into a Magic Beast's skull.

A simple thrust, but the windup was incredibly short. The Wolf Beast on the receiving end never got to show how sharp its fangs were before it died.

Twisting at the waist with her left foot as the pivot, she drove the spear through the beast's hide.

More precisely, rather than aiming for the hide, she had jabbed into the weaker inside of its mouth first.

Pulling the spear free, protruding as it was from the back of the skull, was a sight in itself.

Brunhild launched herself off the ground, kicked off near the beast's shoulder with both feet while still in the air, and wrenched the spear loose.

She made up for her lack of raw strength with fluid, springy movement. Then, spear in hand, she planted it in the ground and flipped back onto her feet. All of it together proved her body control was something else entirely.

Someone is not needed.

His heart stirred.

It was a thought he'd had once, watching people die.

What if they had the strength to protect themselves before asking for someone else's help?

Toss a gold coin to a beggar, and once it's spent, they go back to begging.

But teach the beggar to work instead of handing them gold, and they learn to live by labor, not by asking.

I'll be gone, but the Magic Beast threat will still be here.

The Boatman's whisper from the night before was still clear in his ears.

"Look. Say you help them and leave, what then? These people will die sooner or later. Can you turn away from their deaths and go?"

An attempt to find some weak spot and dig into it.

Enkrid didn't waver.

He would do what he could. What came after was each person's own choice.

He would give them a deterrent, grounded in the principles that governed the continent. The same principle behind building frontier towns.

Kill Magic Beasts repeatedly, and with blood and death, plant signposts and declare territory.

A claim made by force.

I can't kill every Magic Beast.

These people had already gotten themselves on their feet. All they needed was a bit of strength in their hands.

Most of the villagers had no idea what Enkrid was actually doing, but Harkvent seemed to have figured out roughly half of it, and Eirik had understood from the start.

Brunhild and a few of the others didn't seem to have thought about it at all.

Someone is not needed.

The same words rose again.

He had seen a child's burned corpse.

He had seen the body of a mercenary whose head had been torn off trying to protect that child.

Standing among the dying, Enkrid had thought those words.

And now here he was.

"Ha!"

He watched as they drove back the Magic Beasts with a sharp cry.

Not one of them had died.

Hold out.

Eirik had read it correctly. Enkrid had made them hold out.

That was enough. From up in the tree, Enkrid's gaze shifted to one side.

He had senses sharper than any common knight, so he hadn't missed the malice-laden stare that had been fixed on him for days.

It'll keep watching until I leave.

Just as Eirik and Brunhild existed among the humans here, something like them existed among the Magic Beasts too, one that could think and fight. That one was the driving force behind all of this.

Even if Enkrid couldn't kill every Magic Beast in one sweep, he could put down the troublesome few without much trouble.

The pack of Magic Beasts was like dozens of Colonies rolled into one.

Among them, there would be core individuals responsible for each Colony. Kill those, and the immediate threat hanging over the village would shrink.

Enkrid stepped off a branch and launched himself into the air. He leaped from tree to tree like a flying squirrel, except twice as fast as any flying squirrel would manage.

Then came a moment when there was no good foothold and he dropped to the ground.

Two spotted Panther Beasts burst out from his left and right.

However stealthy they were, he had felt nothing until the very instant before they struck.

The hair on the back of his neck stood up just before the panthers attacked.

A warning from instinct.

The moment he registered it, he shifted his center of gravity. He channeled all his forward momentum into his left foot and drove it into the ground to stop.

Thud!

Dirt, stones, and twigs flew up to eye level with a heavy impact.

Through that spray, the claws of two Panther Beasts swept for his head and his side.

Splitting left and right wasn't enough for them, so they split high and low as well. Cunning creatures.

But that was all they had. Still planted, Enkrid extended his blade to each side.

The sun burned solid and bright overhead. The arc Three-Iron cut through the air drew a circle, as if a new sun had been born behind his back.

Instead of heat, it was the blade's sharpness that scattered outward like sunlight.

Thwack.

The sound that followed was small. There was no need to swing faster than sound.

All it took was placing the blade against the force of their charge and drawing it across as he pushed through.

Three-Iron's edge was sharp enough for that.

That was what he did. The one on the right he cut with true silver. The one on the left he split with hardest iron.

Stop, cut, run again. Every motion within a single breath.

Two Panther Beasts collapsed behind him, spilling black blood and entrails onto the ground.

As he kicked off and kept moving, it looked as though a long line trailed in his wake.

He could fight a war of attrition, but that would eat up time.

He'd told them to hold out, but there was no guarantee the ones he'd left behind would stay safe indefinitely.

So he had a time limit. Was that difficult?

No.

Line-burst wasn't the same across the board. There were thin lines and thick lines.

What if he applied the tricks he'd learned from line-burst to Strong Legs, the method of loading Will into his legs? Doing it that way, his body felt noticeably lighter. Trees blurred past on both sides. Naturally, his body's reaction speed scaled in proportion to his sprinting speed.

So even at a full sprint through the forest, he didn't catch a branch across the face or get jabbed by one.

Enkrid's sprint brought him face to face with a Fox Beast.

Rather than keep running and get caught from behind, the fox chose to stand and fight.

Sharp, this one. The moment he confronted it, more than a hundred Fox Beasts closed in around him.

Hidden in the shadows, eyes gleaming, presence suppressed.

A skill learned in the wild.

They said the Assimilation knights used had been learned by watching elves, but seeing the Magic Beasts' technique now, he wasn't so sure.

If the elves had originally learned by watching the footwork of wild animals, then it was just as fair to say they had learned it from Magic Beasts to begin with.

A story Valmund Balpier had told him came to mind.

Humans.

Had learned Pressure by watching Demon Creatures.

And if Assimilation was learned by watching Magic Beasts?

He had said that now, in turn, Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts were learning from humans.

What else is hiding inside the Cursed Ground?

He found himself curious about it again. The fighters there, and not mere fragments of Balroks, but whole ones.

The Fox Beasts hid blades in their tails and could extend their claws, but compared to everything he had walked through today, it was an easy fight.

Enkrid's Three-Iron and Penna took the floor.

With the sun as a chandelier and black Magic Beast blood as the carpet, the only stars at this ball were two swords.

Cut, thrust, burst, kill. Then he returned to the village.

The villagers stared at him wide-eyed, their faces mixing cheers and relief and disbelief.

"Bring water to wash," Harkvent said, looking him over.

He was probably a grim sight, soaked head to toe in black blood.

Even so, no one scolded him for it.

The gazes Enkrid felt were not all the same.

Among the Magic Beasts targeting this village, three more dangerous ones still remained.

He didn't change his tactics. Let them hold out while he killed the key Magic Beasts.

The pack had reason enough to give up, but they never pulled back.

There's something they want here.

Easy enough to guess, though he didn't dwell on it.

In two more pursuits much like the first, Enkrid killed a bear, small in frame but blindingly fast, and in the middle of a pack of jackals and wild dogs moving as one body, he cut the throat of a single black dog.

The last one was a tiger whose hide had hardened past steel.

Until now he had been the one doing the chasing, but the final Magic Beast was waiting for him, as if stepping out to meet him.

Grrr.

"Dreaming of becoming a Beast King, were you?"

He asked it on instinct. Magic Beasts had no way to answer in human language, but the low rumbling that came out sounded exactly like a yes.

Seeing the essence of a thing without going through sensation, experience, association, judgment, or inference. That is called intuition.

Enkrid's intuition had already surpassed that of ordinary people and common knights alike.

It was an answer built from the accumulation of this day, years of experience, and knowledge gained fighting inhuman monsters and demons.

Beast King.

He didn't know the name. But the tiger had truly dreamed of becoming king of the Magic Beasts.

In the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range, even a Magic Beast couldn't rest easy at the top of the food chain.

The tiger that had become a Magic Beast had dreamed.

A life of claiming the mountain range as its own territory, ranging across the entire continent, chewing human flesh in the morning and drinking elven blood in the evening.

Grrr.

Audacious and bold dreams. And those dreams could have come true. The reason the Tiger Beast had targeted this place was the ore hidden behind the village.

Swallow that down, and it would become something new.

If not for the human standing in front of it.

No, if not for the others who had stood in its way before.

The one reason this human village had survived so long was that a few Demon Creatures had attacked from the opposite front and been dealt with.

Enkrid didn't underestimate the creature before him.

It had united Magic Beasts across species into a single pack, risen to the top of that, and reshaped the territory of the mountain range.

Just as there were beings among humans and other intelligent races equivalent to knights, special individuals could be born among Magic Beasts too.

Among Demon Creatures, there are standouts as well.

The Cursed Ground is where they gather.

Similar to what stood before him now.

The tiger's shoulder muscles tensed. Invisible to the eye, but a sixth sense beyond the five read it.

The instant he registered the weight shifting into its hind legs, the tiger's forepaw came down from above.

Crouching, it had been hard to gauge, but standing, it was larger than the house-sized bear, and even so it moved faster than the quick-pawed bear he'd fought before.

Sound fell away and the air pressed down heavy on his shoulders. He felt pressure like fighting while sunk in a swamp. The sensation of time stretching out.

What was needed to shed that crushing weight was strength beyond human limits, raw physical force.

Enkrid wrung out every muscle, poured in Will, and swung Three-Iron.

And the tiger, mid-swing of its forepaw, opened its jaws and breathed fire. A move outside what he had predicted.

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