WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 744: Resentment and Despair

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"It was simply my time to die. Everyone dies eventually."

He watched Jaxon face his own death with complete calm. After Jaxon came Audin.

"The Apostle of War shall guide you."

Audin gathered his last breath and offered a blessing prayer.

"I believe it was the happiest time of my life."

Teresa, the half-blood Giant, died singing in that same quiet voice.

"Betrothed, it seems the time has come for you to take an Evil Spirit as your bride."

Sinar kept making jokes right up until the end.

That was so like her.

Grrr.

'Why is Esther a panther?'

The only witch Enkrid knew died in the form of a black panther. Many others died alongside her. The nightmare was a book whose pages were stuffed with loss.

He could not see how each one died, but the simple fact that death was closing in became a piercing reality that made his chest ache.

"Watch and enjoy. This is only the beginning."

The Boatman had made up his mind to gnaw at Enkrid's mind.

Like a squirrel chewing through an acorn's shell, he pressed his mental venom in a little at a time.

Enkrid woke and pushed the nightmare aside. Last night's cast had been even more colorful than the night before.

Remembering it changed nothing, and trying to talk the Boatman out of his nightly routine did not seem like it would work either.

It was only a feeling, but...'He has something he's after.'

There was a reason behind what the Boatman did. Telling what that reason was was hard enough that there was nothing useful to say about it yet.

Nothing to do but get on with things.

Fell had been standing for three days straight before he finally collapsed. That had been last night.

"What is it you called us all here for, brother?"

Audin stood at one end of the training ground and spoke as Enkrid stepped forward.

"You know I'm busy, yeah?"

Rem was there, looking like he had all the time in the world.

"At the crack of dawn?"

Dawn had passed quite a while ago, but the lazy man still insisted it was early morning. Jaxon stood with his arms crossed and said nothing. Sinar wore her usual blank expression, though every now and then she smiled in a way that brought the Dortea Portrait to mind.

Esther had shifted into her panther form and was watching with her face resting on her front paws. Teresa sat quietly beside her.

Enkrid looked them over while warming up, working carefully from his fingertips outward through every muscle.

"No, really, what are you doing?"

"Get in front of me. Rem."

Enkrid ignored the provoking Barbarian and met Rem's eyes.

Something in the air shifted. The only movement Enkrid had made was to ease his left foot a half step forward.

Ruagarne, watching from the side, recognized it as part of tactical swordsmanship.

'That left foot could be the start of an attack, but just as easily the start of a feint.'

Tactical swordsmanship was about seizing every possible advantage before the fight even began.

Rem opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. His hand had already found the axe handle without him noticing.

The distance between them was about right for swinging a weapon.

In truth, both of them were so far past the basics of fighting that they could swing sword or axe regardless of distance, but the point was that a swing would connect from here.

The sounds of the world faded and his field of vision narrowed. Only Rem remained in Enkrid's sight.

'The spacing favors me.'

He had left the Three-Iron with Aetri, so all he had at his hip now was Penna.

Still longer than an axe, so the reach was an advantage.

The environment? Rem would use that better. Optimizing his thinking on the fly was Rem's nature, and he worked by instinct and intuition, making use of everything around him.

Enkrid took in the situation and the surroundings in full without ever letting his eyes leave Rem.

Rem did the same.

Neither blinked. Dust on the wind passed between them and neither moved.

Early summer sunlight touched the blades of grass pushing up through the cracks between the stones of the training ground.

It was the kind of warmth that made standing still uncomfortable.

Enkrid and Rem swung their weapons at each other. It was hard to say who moved first.

That was how fast they were, and how well each read the other's breathing.

'He's grown even more.'

Rem saw that the sword Enkrid was throwing out had come to match his axe in speed.

Clang!

Metal struck metal and sparks flew. Dozens of Attack Lines between them reached for each other's bodies, but every one of them missed.

Enkrid moved through calculation. Rem swung his axe and shifted his feet by instinct.

Rem held nothing back. He loaded Sorcery into his body through divine manifestation and let it course through him, pushing himself to a level that would leave a toll when it was over.

Enkrid was the same. He drove Will forcefully through his whole body with line-burst.

Their fight was like a cart that had hit a downhill and was picking up speed. Stopping it would take someone able to absorb everything that was coming.

Picking a side and killing the other one would be easy enough.

Subduing both without either getting hurt, though, that would be difficult even for Mercenary King Anu.

Could even Ragna and Audin rushing in at the same time stop it without either man taking a scratch?

It would not be simple.

Enkrid kept swinging and sank deeper inside himself.

'Faster.'

He narrowed the gap between thoughts. As much as the raw, instinctive intuition Rem was showing him.

For one instant, Enkrid's sword was faster. Flash. No, the chain form of Flash: Lightning.

Rem's axe moved toward the blade drawing white light through the air. It became a typhoon that cut across the Lightning and swallowed it.

The axe traced the most efficient path and came to meet him.

Enkrid went one step further. For a single moment he gathered his line-burst into a point and detonated it.

At the end of that exchange, Penna swung upward with his left foot as the pivot and drew a line through the air, and Rem's arm crossed that line.

Shick.

Enkrid cut through Rem's right arm. Rem heard the wet sound of splitting flesh near his ear.

Rem had driven his axe down at the same moment, so it caught Enkrid's shoulder, but it did not cut. It would leave a decent gash, nothing more.

So Rem understood. Let this go on, and he was the one who would lose.

'I lost.'

That was what Rem thought. If the fight continued, the man missing an arm was the obvious loser.

It was not just an arm. Losing something that had always been there would throw off his body sense, and it would take a moment to adjust to a weight distribution that was no longer normal. Against a knight, that moment would be a fatal opening.

'Won't go quietly, though.'

That thought ran through Enkrid's mind too. He narrowed his eyes and acknowledged that even missing an arm, Rem was no easy thing to deal with.

Picturing a berserker swinging an axe with one arm gone was not hard.

A fight where the shift in body sense and weight no longer mattered, where you closed the distance and gave flesh to take flesh, gave bone to break bone, that was what would come.

He could see it. And there was no reason to push it that far.

The fight ends here.

"...What in the world did you just do?"

A drop of sweat fell from the tip of Rem's chin to the ground.

"Fun, wasn't it?"

Enkrid asked.

Rem rolled his right arm in a circle and answered. All of it had been an illusion. More precisely, because each of them knew the other's skill well enough, they had fought in an imagined space.

"It was fun."

"I heard the Empire teaches Pressure Manifestation as a foundation. Figured something like this might be possible."

The first time Enkrid had seen the Zaun family head, the man's greatsword had looked ready to cut someone down at any moment.

Pressure Manifestation.

Work it a little more finely, and fighting in an imagined space seemed possible.

Which meant you could spar at full intensity without actual blades, a deeper, denser, more dangerous kind of practice.

Now that they were at a level where going all-out with real weapons meant one of them would end up badly hurt, this was the method Enkrid had worked out.

He had no interest in learning some dulled-down sparring swordsmanship.

Training itself was good.

'Nothing trains you like the real thing.'

He had figured that out while teaching people in a small village to survive.

What Enkrid and Rem had actually done came down to this: each of them had shifted a finger and moved a foot, and fought purely through the momentum each projected from where they stood.

It required exceptional insight on both sides, and an accurate read of your own current state. A kind of acrobatics that only worked if those conditions were met.

"The Lord's servant is waiting for the next turn."

"Now that really is something interesting you've made."

Audin and Ragna each put in a word. Sinar raised her momentum and made clear she was willing to step forward next.

Jaxon uncrossed his arms and said, "With a method like this, I think I can show you something interesting too."

Fight in the imagined space, then cross hands for real a few times. If that process itself was not fun, what in the world was?

Moving the body was satisfying. Swinging a sword was more satisfying still.

Every time an attack came from outside what he expected, Enkrid felt a sharp surge of joy.

The dream from the night before had gone completely dark in his memory by now.

Sinar showed a summer storm, something else entirely from Winter's Gentle Breeze.

Audin showed what a trained body could do when compressed and detonated, not just Will, but the raw power in honed muscle.

Once you were caught in that grip, winning back the upper hand was nearly impossible. Audin's hands, twisting and breaking joints, looked like they could shatter anything they touched.

Ragna showed his sword without any particular expression, then said, "The sword's name is Ilchul. It goes by the name 'the Rising Sun.' Touch it and you burn."

A weapon passed down through the family, inscribed by pressing his own Will into it.

Not newly forged, but a sword Ragna himself felt had been prepared for him.

It held heat. Even grazing the collar was enough to bring up flames.

Sparring lightly with it in reality gave a much sharper sense of Ilchul's power than fighting in the imagined space had.

'Clothes catch fire just from a graze.'

He had heard it could put out heat enough to flash-evaporate the sweat on your skin.

Ilchul, the Rising Sun, not a name given for nothing. There was nothing hotter in the world than the sun.

With Jaxon, it came down to a single strike.

The thrust Jaxon had shown before was a thrust with all killing intent stripped away.

This was different. He attacked without any care for his own body. He was willing to throw away an arm to go for the other man's life.

"Try and stop it."

Jaxon smiled as he said it. A satisfied smile.

Enkrid was not the only one burning with it. The Madman Knights were a collection of exactly this kind of person, when it came down to it.

"It is fun."

Rem's words spoke for all of them.

Back in Border Guard, living an ordinary life.

He had sweated out the nightmare, but that night and the next the Boatman applied himself to Enkrid once more.

"My child has grown up without a father."

It was Arath, Rem's wife. In her arms she held a newborn.

Rem and Arath's child.

"Was this right?"

She asked it. The question carried something beneath it: was dying the only choice Rem had? Was this truly the best it could have been?

The Boatman's nightmares were a series.

Loss came first, then resentment.

"My son is dead."

The Ragged Holy Man stepped forward next and looked at Enkrid without expression.

Leona, who had lost her trading company, sat crumpled on the ground and muttered that this was not what she had wanted.

"It isn't over yet."

The Boatman said it, and showed a third piece after loss and resentment.

The theme of the third nightmare was despair.

Enkrid dreamed a long dream.

He lived on for more than ten years.

Border Guard held out in the end, and with Crang's help, Naurillia grew wealthy and strong.

Then one day, black darkness closed around Border Guard.

The entire city filled with Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts.

Contact with the outside world was cut off. An inevitable situation had come, one that existed precisely because the Cursed Ground was there.

"Captain!"

Krais came looking for him. Reading the feeling in his eyes was not difficult.

"We're going to fight to the end, right?"

The spirit Enkrid had shown had bled into Krais too. He was not being swallowed by anxiety or fear. But he knew how it ended.

"We fight until the moment we die, right?"

Everyone accepted that they would die here.

Krais spoke and everyone gathered. Enkrid and all of them fought the darkness that had swallowed Border Guard for a full year.

The stored food ran out, and even the weeping over the dying fell silent.

Leave alone and you can survive. You know that, don't you? Go. Leave. Walk toward a comfortable today.

Inside the despair, inside the dream within the dream, the Boatman whispered.

Enkrid did not listen. Enemies surrounded him on all sides and there was no stopping them.

Trapped in a today that was nothing but dying while fighting Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts, the Boatman spoke to him.

"Is this truly what you wanted?"

Loss. Resentment. Despair.

All three stabbed into his chest and dug around, but the damage was not great.

The truth was, Enkrid had already found his answers to what the Boatman had been showing him.

'Waiting and hoping for someone to come save you is a fool's errand.'

And yet, alone, you can do nothing.

Enkrid had already come to know both of those truths.

He shook off the nightmare and got up, and as he surfaced from the dream he caught the Boatman's last words.

"You don't take the bait."

Enkrid figured the Boatman had been unusually diligent for the first time in a long while. Ending up a disappointment to him was just something that could not be helped.

He went outside and found, though dawn had not yet broken, that someone had beaten him there.

Fell stood with the tip of the Idol Slayer touching the training ground floor, eyes serene and distant.

His pupils were still and his momentum was calm. Like a quiet lake.

"Captain."

"Yeah."

"If I win, do I become Knight Commander?"

One look was enough for Enkrid to read Fell's state. A fool drunk on omnipotence had picked up a sword.

"Then it looks like today's the day I take that seat."

Fell was far more unhinged than when Enkrid had first met him. Probably all Rem's influence.

People who stayed sane like Enkrid himself were not exactly common in the Madman Knights.

Enkrid picked up a training blunt. No edge, shaped just right for use as a club.

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