WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 743: Loss

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"So. You killed every last Magic Beast and finally escaped today."

The rippling Black River, the purple lamp, the Boatman's appearance, all of it told Enkrid this was no dream.

He had been sitting on the gunwale, staring into the distance, when he turned his head.

No matter where he looked in this place, there was no end in sight. More precisely, nothing but endings.

It felt like walls on every side. Even with the river flowing and the lamplight stretching on without break, that was still the impression. Why? He couldn't say. It just was.

"Congratulations. Born mortal, yet one who will at last desire immortality."

The words carried a pedantic weight.

Tonight the Boatman was poetic. Or perhaps he looked like a sage probing at some fundamental truth.

"I've never wanted immortality."

"You will."

"You're declaring that as certain?"

After everything that's already happened to me?

That was the unspoken undercurrent of the question.

The corner of the Boatman's mouth twisted into a curl. He smiled readily enough these days. Compared to their first meeting, the change was unmistakable.

"The moment you are locked inside the prison called regret, you will beg and plead. Yes, you will not believe it. You will not accept it. I know. So I will show you."

The hand not holding the lamp rose into the air. His robe fluttered upward with the motion, and the inside of it was dark, as if someone had painted it pitch black, visible one moment and not the next.

His attention snagged on that darkness for just an instant, and when he looked up, the world had already changed. He was no longer on the boat.

On black earth, Enkrid knelt on one knee, someone cradled in his arms.

"Leave me and go. Do your job. Damn it."

Blood-matted hair had turned a duller shade than its usual gray.

Rem was dying. There was nothing to be done.

"I am not unaware that the future is variable. Yes, this would be a very distant future."

The Boatman's voice rang from every direction.

Not a vile or wicked voice. If anything, it was flat. It simply laid out a high-probability prediction, nothing more.

That was what made it feel so real.

Rem died. Enkrid had to watch the last breath leave him right there in his hands.

"That is the first today you will earn going forward."

Loss. The act of losing something.

The Boatman's intent was plain enough.

Carry that grief. Must you truly march toward such painful days?

He understood the intent. That didn't mean he had to play along.

And besides.

'It hasn't happened yet.'

Nothing was knowable. Then worrying about it now wouldn't change a thing.

So. Shake it off, get up, and do what needed doing.

Enkrid woke from the dream and opened his eyes. The smell of water hit him the moment he did. A damp chill had been creeping in since the night before, and now a light rain had begun to fall.

"Up we go."

He rose easily from the bed, a firmness he liked. It had been a gift from Sinar, filled with some special leaves, or so she had said.

He stripped off his shirt, pulled on thin trousers, and stepped outside.

"You're up, brother."

Audin, bear-big, greeted him with a wide smile.

"You're early."

"It's the week of dawn prayers."

A priest who served the God of War, and he kept his prayer week faithfully.

Even inside Legion, the city they called holy, there couldn't be many people that devout.

Except perhaps for the Ragged Holy Man, the one Audin called his spiritual father.

That Holy Man was supposedly heading to Legion now. He had left midway after receiving some request, and there had been word that a letter arrived from Sir Overdier.

'Someone like Sir Overdier would be devout, I imagine.'

Beyond him, probably just Noah.

When Enkrid came back to Border Guard, there had been several letters waiting from Noah.

Most of it was idle talk, but the meaning underneath was clear.

If he was needed and could be useful, he would do whatever it took. It wasn't about repaying a debt. More that Enkrid had helped him as a friend, and so he could do the same in return.

'That's a lot to take on.'

If he really had been captured by the Empire, things would have gotten very complicated.

Audin spoke beside him.

"You weren't idle while you were away."

Enkrid had kept training throughout his time at the Zaun household. For him, that went without saying.

"Obviously."

"Right then."

The two of them stood in the early morning rain, lifting and lowering stones, then lay flat with iron balls Aetri had made for them clamped between their legs, raising and lowering on core strength alone.

Anyone watching would have been horrified.

Drop the iron ball between your feet and your face would be destroyed. Bad luck, and it falls between the thighs instead, far worse.

Naturally, neither of them dropped anything. They trained without expression.

"I'd been looking forward to the war with the Empire. Shame it didn't happen."

A little while later Fell came out and said it, and Ropord beside him shook his head.

"I wasn't."

War breeds grief. Ropord knew that. Fell wasn't ignorant of it either, but his position was simply that you fight when you have to.

Enkrid observed the two of them. Remarkably different, yet something about their temperaments rhymed.

Both would engage when there was work to be done, but the path each took differed. So the shape of what they would come to understand would differ too.

An old question surfaced again.

'Can a knight be raised through a structured system?'

These two had been beaten and rolled through the dirt countless times for exactly that. Audin had filled him in on the progress just yesterday.

"I put them through it thoroughly. Both of them have become very interesting now."

Enkrid thought he understood why Audin said that.

'Will is responding.'

The moment he looked at them, both instinctively adjusted their stance and braced themselves. Not because there was any reason to fight. Closer to a conditioned reflex.

'A response learned through repeated experience.'

Bringing them this far had been his system's doing.

Could a knight be created through a system? What was the answer?

'A half-built system isn't enough.'

Simply beating the body could get them, at the junior knight level, to moving their Will at an absurd speed. But it couldn't guide them to becoming knights.

'Making them use Will from the unconscious.'

That was the next goal for these two.

And this hadn't been something he'd anticipated or planned.

He'd just seen them, watched how they braced themselves, and something stirred in him. That was all.

He had visited Zaun and stayed in a small village.

In all the time it had taken him to return to Border Guard, Enkrid had learned a great deal, and no small part of that had come from the act of teaching.

The conversation with Valmund Balpier had helped as well.

'A knight must awaken their way upward.'

It doesn't end with simply becoming stronger.

'Everything within harmony.'

Strength, reaction, sensation, everything moving as one. What leads all of it is will.

Ropord and Fell were different. So they needed different methods.

Call half of it luck and coincidence, and the other half was owed to Enkrid's unusual path of growth.

Enkrid intuitively grasped how to lift both of them to the level of a knight.

The thought came, and his body moved. Same as always. He set down the iron ball and gripped the Three-Iron.

"Fell."

He spoke and moved in the same breath. The Three-Iron, already drawn, rose vertically and came down, and somewhere between lifting his foot and swinging his arm, he raised Pressure and bore it down onto Fell.

From the outside it didn't look like a fast swing.

'He can't block it.'

Ropord knew the moment he saw it. There was something singular about his insight.

He glimpsed the outcome and sensed death. Not his own. Fell's.

Ruagarne, who had come out at some point to watch, had eyes that went wider than they had ever gone. Red veins stood out sharply across them. She had pushed every thread of her Frog race's natural perception to its limit.

'He cuts down and splits the body. Even if you dodge, you lose an arm.'

Pressure and sword together.

The windup was short. There was no warning.

Fell, the target, put his hand on Idol Slayer. Before Enkrid even called his name, something in the instinctual layer had already felt the threat.

The way a prey animal drinks with its eyes on what's behind it, Fell's wariness had shot up the instant he laid eyes on Enkrid, for no clear reason he could name.

Then he caught the moment Enkrid's energy shifted and reacted.

Idol Slayer cleared the scabbard.

Ching.

Block it and live. Fail and die.

He needed to draw out his Will, but there was no time to think that thought. No time to think anything, so everything came naturally.

For a person, survival is the most fundamental drive.

On top of that, Fell was from the Shepherds of the Wilderness. They would do anything to stay alive. That was what Fell had been taught since he was small.

To live, he pulled up his Will before any intention could form around it.

Zhiiing.

Idol Slayer responded to the Will, and every muscle and nerve and sense in his body became one thing as he swatted at Enkrid's sword.

Whoom.

No ring of steel on steel.

The Three-Iron had stopped mid-fall and pulled back, and Idol Slayer had only cut empty air.

Then Fell looked at Enkrid, but his eyes weren't seeing Enkrid. They were fixed somewhere much further away.

Thud.

The tip of Idol Slayer, which had slashed at nothing, dropped and touched the ground. Fell stood there with his arm hanging, frozen in place.

Everyone was watching, wondering what on earth had just happened.

"Shh."

Enkrid raised one finger to his lips. Fell had stepped inside himself.

The body and mind that had endured brutal training under Audin and the Madman Knights stood just one step short of knighthood.

Enkrid had given that step a nudge.

'The Empire's method of training knights.'

It was probably something like this.

'An apprenticeship model.'

The thought came naturally. They would teach through the form of master and disciple, passing it down by inheritance.

That approach could sustain the number of knights.

That was what Valmund had told him, at least.

Rem appeared late, rubbing his eyes, then smiled.

Look at that. Now he's pulling something like this.

What none of the Madman Knights had managed, done in an instant.

What Enkrid had just done with that sword was exactly that.

'Just the right speed.'

Threatening a life without killing, leaving no room for any other thought.

Easy to say.

Enkrid looked at Rem and silently mouthed two words.

Later.

He'd felt his will stir and a trace of momentum leak out on its own, and wanted him to know.

Jaxon had just stepped out of the lodging, and he felt it too. Enkrid's senses were far sharper than before.

Thinking back, the moment they'd met, Enkrid had already tracked exactly where he was standing.

Jaxon's eyes lit up as well.

The game of tag wasn't going to be as easy as it used to be. Sneaking up from behind was going to be a real challenge now.

Everyone except Ragna drifted to the far end of the training ground. He was still asleep.

Only after they had moved Fell well away did Ropord speak.

"Why only Fell."

If Fell broke through first, what was supposed to happen to him?

Enkrid looked at him and said, "Swing your sword for three days without stopping. No water. Every time, like you're stopping it with the last thing you have before you die."

If what Fell needed was a sharp and sudden shock, what Ropord needed was time to settle everything that had already accumulated.

Ropord was quiet for a moment, then answered.

"I'll be away for a while."

Clemen the Squire had taken over the new recruit training, so there was nothing in particular keeping Ropord here.

He left without another word. He would change and come back before Fell woke up. That resolve was written plainly across his back as he walked away.

"Looks like you came back with something interesting."

Rem said it. Ragna had already seen that Enkrid's level had shifted, but the rest hadn't.

"Picked up quite a bit."

"Yeah?"

He seemed ready to go right now, but Enkrid glanced up at where the sun was pushing through a gap in the clouds and said, "Later. I have somewhere to be."

"You're turning down a spar?"

Rem looked genuinely surprised, and Enkrid answered evenly.

"The grip on the Three-Iron's come loose. If we're doing this, I want it done right."

"I'll wait, brother."

It was Audin who answered.

"Teresa, she's already there, right?"

Audin smiled and nodded.

She had gotten there before Ropord and Fell. The way she had climbed was different from either of them too.

It had happened while Enkrid was away. Audin, thinking of her, had pointed her toward different paths and shared what he knew along the way.

"She could enter the Holy Knight Order."

He had made the suggestion, but.

"The place I want to live, the place that's home, it's here."

Teresa shook her head. Not a moment's hesitation.

Why did everyone call this place home?

The man who had become that reason nodded, picked up his oiled cloak, and said, "I'll be back shortly."

Aetri was waiting. Three days had already passed since Enkrid returned.

The first day back, he'd arrived to find it already evening.

The next day, he'd told everyone what had happened while he was gone.

"The captain's stories really are something."

That was what Rem had said listening. He'd already heard it from Ragna, but apparently Ragna had a habit of cutting everything too short.

Ann had been there too, but she wasn't much of a talker either.

Enkrid had been paying for stories and listening to them for a long time now.

He couldn't claim no gift for it at all, and having listened to so many people who knew how to spin a tale, he'd picked up enough to manage it himself.

Jaxon agreed with that too.

"You almost want to ask for the next part right away."

His expression was calm, but that was what he said.

Aetri, who had taken the Three-Iron, said to give him four days.

"I'll see to it and return it to you. And I've secured the true iron, but you'll need to wait a little longer for that."

The Inscribed Weapon wasn't ready yet. Though the Three-Iron was already halfway there.

"Alright."

Enkrid answered and stood. He didn't ask for details. That was Aetri's business to sort out.

A Frog who made ornaments caught her eye on him and gave a knowing look, and Enkrid gave a vague nod back and left.

The rain had mostly stopped. Sunlight was quietly slipping its head out.

When he got back to the unit, Rem was flipping three hatchets into the air and catching them, tossing all three in sequence, alternating hands left and right.

For an ordinary person it would be a circus act. For Rem it was not.

"What are you doing?"

"Can't you see?"

Whatever you said to him, whatever came back was never gentle. Blame Rem's parents for that, perhaps.

Looking at Rem, Enkrid realized the dream from last night hadn't fully shaken loose.

No one had been walking through the room, but there was a faint residue left behind, like fine dust settled over a floor that hadn't been swept in days.

So the words came out.

"Don't die easy, Rem."

Thwack.

Rem snatched the spinning hatchet out of the air. A light moved through his gray eyes. The effect of Sorcery filling every part of him.

"You want a round?"

Whatever you said, he'd take it his own way. That was Rem for you.

A Barbarian who heard a word of concern as a declaration of war. Right here, in the flesh.

"Wait."

Enkrid held up a palm.

He was preparing something inside himself. He wanted to get it settled and show everyone first.

Until then, he'd hold off on sparring.

"Do I look like a dog to you?"

Rem glared at Enkrid's palm and looked annoyed, but that was just ordinary life.

And that night.

"Now then. What do you think?"

The Boatman had arranged a new stage.

Same set. Different actor.

This time, the one dying in Enkrid's arms was Jaxon.

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