WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 746: The Boatman's Words Were Reasonable

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I want to become a knight.

I will protect those who stand behind me.

I will erase the Cursed Ground.

Follow those words far enough, and what Enkrid truly wanted came into view.

Ordinary days.

Days layered with peace and wrapped in laughter.

A fruit seller greets you with a smile. Someone roasts potatoes over a fire and shares them with a hungry child. A barmaid with clever hands clicks her tongue and flicks the child on the forehead, yet looks after them all the same. People return from long roads bearing gifts. Everyone cries sometimes, but each new morning is met with a smile.

Yes. That was the today Enkrid had wanted most. The ultimate day he had dreamed of through all his years of living.

Could he say he had experienced that day now?

In part, yes.

Then was it not enough to protect what lay within his fence and let these days simply repeat?

It was.

Was there any reason to push that fence wider?

There was not.

Enkrid listened to the answer that welled up from somewhere inside him. It was not wrong.

"Yes. This is exactly what you wanted."

The Boatman's voice carried weight. Conviction. Certainty. And along with it, he offered a reprieve.

"For some time, the 'now' will continue. So you can choose whenever you like."

Do nothing for a while. Enjoy it.

Enkrid woke and spent the day as he always did. The Boatman was right. The today he truly wanted kept coming. Training was a pleasure, and the thrill of growth had not faded.

"Your training will go on. Are you not glad of it?"

The Boatman appeared in the night and asked. He was.

In the repeating days, not everything reset. Even after death, what Enkrid had trained and learned stayed in his body.

Had that, too, been a gift from the Boatman?

Be satisfied with this?

His purpose was not to wander a rugged mountain path. It was to spend comfortable days in a warm home.

"Is everyone busy?"

The next day, Enkrid called out to Audin as he passed.

"Lately Ragna and the others have all been keeping quite busy, yes."

Rem was deep in drilling his unit. Ragna had his ten swordsmen at his side and spent every hour swinging his blade.

Fell, who had been loitering nearby, cut in.

"Why, shall I gather everyone?"

Fell was Enkrid's lieutenant, and Ropord was Ragna's. Even after becoming knights, those roles had not changed. In truth, without Ropord, Ragna's unit was hard to keep in order, and Fell was there simply because he wanted to be.

"I'd like everyone together this evening."

Enkrid was, by all accounts, the head of the Madman Knights and the lord of Border Guard. A handful of nobles who did not know better even eyed him with suspicion, wondering if he was building a new kingdom in Border Guard. Enkrid himself had little interest in such talk, but at any rate, he had rarely summoned his people by force. This was the first time he had called for a gathering this quietly, without the heat of battle carrying the order. He had been that way since his days as a squad leader.

Listening to those words, Fell felt the hairs on his arms rise.

Why?

The tone was calm. The manner was the same as always. There was no reason for this feeling.

Fell glanced at Audin. Audin stood smiling, hands folded in prayer.

"O Lord Father, do you have need of my hands? Is this your voice speaking through this man?"

What was that about?

Fell ignored it and made up his mind to call the others. First Rem, no, Rem would be last.

"Understood."

He pushed aside the cold instinct clawing at him and moved. Ragna had been gripping Ilchul for days now, swinging his sword from morning until evening.

It was not some advanced technique or refined sword art he was working on, nor did it look like he was enjoying a spar. He took his stance, cut downward, thrust, cut diagonally, thrust again with one hand, wound the blade over, looped it in, repeating the fundamentals like a textbook of the northern Heavy Sword Style.

The same kind of daily repetition Fell himself put in.

A solid foundation lets you climb higher.

That was Enkrid's teaching. Fell had picked up a great deal just from watching him, often without realizing it. In truth, the same was true of the others.

Dividing the stages of knighthood.

Putting Will into technique: beginner.

Putting individuality into technique: intermediate.

Not being bound by technique at all: advanced.

And above that, the highest level.

What was that? You had to possess variability?

Be free to become a circle one moment and an awl the next?

Fell had experienced omnipotence.

It was exactly that, the certainty that you could do anything, filling every part of your body to the brim. Reach out and the sun seemed within grasp. One stroke of the blade could shear the ridge of a distant mountain.

Get drunk on that sensation and you pour out all your Will and crash into exhaustion.

Fell had experienced that exhaustion. Only, to him the mountain was not some far peak, and the sun was not up in the sky.

The captain.

Sun, mountain, Enkrid. All the same word.

That was why he had gone to Enkrid and gotten thoroughly beaten.

Someone else might have crumbled in that moment, singing of frustration and despair. Talk of climbing from beginner and intermediate all the way to knighthood might have made them shudder.

You finally become a knight and you still have to go higher?

Some of the decorative knights the Empire called flower knights might have felt that way.

Fell, of course, was nothing like that.

And really, neither was the rest of the Madman Knights.

I can go higher.

Knowing there was still somewhere above him was more than welcome. If this were the ceiling, he would have been disappointed instead.

He also understood now why he had been drifting in thought like this.

The momentum rolling off Ragna as he swung his sword alone was a wall that refused entry.

This is terrifying.

It was like catching the trail of a massive Lycanthrope Colony that had been hunting sheep. No fight had broken out yet, but there was hard fighting ahead, and it called to mind those days when everyone sharpened their spearheads on whetstones.

Oh.

It clicked for Fell.

They were all preparing for something.

Whoosh.

A hot gust followed the arc of Ragna's sword. If you sharpened that wind to an edge, would it take on physical weight? It made no sense, but if anyone could pull off something like that, it was Ragna.

"What do you want?"

Ropord, who had been training nearby, came over and asked.

"I have a message."

Fell could see that Ragna carried a fierce momentum. He was not killing time. He was honing a blade's edge, tightening it.

Why?

There was only one reason.

There was only one person who set the tone in Border Guard and among the Madman Knights.

"Everyone is to gather this evening."

"Got it."

Ropord was quick to read the room. He did not ask who was calling. There was only one person who could summon Ragna.

After that, Fell went looking for Jaxon and made his way to a shop that sold tea and sweets. A beautiful blond woman greeted him at the door.

This place makes me tense every time I walk in.

What had been a vague feeling before was now clearer.

Two on the roof. One under the counter.

People hidden at every angle.

"There are more than you're sensing, so don't try anything foolish."

Jaxon appeared from nowhere and spoke. No sign, no sound, and suddenly he was right behind Fell.

Fell spun around to find Jaxon with eyes narrowed to slits. The moment those flat eyes met his, gazes pressed in from every direction.

Fighting here would just get me killed.

Not that there was any reason to fight. It was just the feeling of stepping into a net someone else had woven.

"I went a bit heavy-handed earlier, so I'm having trouble with Restraint. What do you want?"

Jaxon spoke, and the unease lifted.

What was that just now? Similar to Pressure, but different.

He had wrapped Will over all five senses and spread it through a zone, a technique for perceiving things beyond what the Will alone could see or hear or feel, extending outward to detect. That was the source of the familiar chill Fell kept sensing here.

Jaxon had used that technique before, reading and killing enemies on the battlefield against Azpen. What Fell had just felt was a step beyond even that.

"Everyone is to gather this evening."

Jaxon nodded. The familiar tension Fell had been feeling vanished cleanly. Everything felt ordinary again.

As Fell turned to leave, the blond woman called after him.

"Take care, you cute little shepherd."

Fell gave a vague nod and walked out. He had not even made it two steps before he stopped.

I've never seen her before.

How did she know he was a shepherd? He had not told anyone in there who he was.

He knew she was Jaxon's partner. So what, Jaxon played the silent type in public but talked his head off in bed? That Jaxon? It did not fit at all.

Of course that was not it. Georg's Blade was an assassin network and an information guild. It made no sense for people like that not to know every capable fighter operating in their territory. And beyond Georg's Blade, the Madman Knights were already famous. There had been no shortage of major incidents by now. Earning the title of Demon Slayer by ending the civil war was the first of them. Within Naurillia, there were those who believed that if the Madman Knights joined the southern front, the stalemate there would finally break.

That was just their opinion, of course. War's outcome was never decided by talk around a desk.

Rem had been deep in the Mountain Range, tracking and killing Demon Creatures. When Fell found him, he was in the middle of dealing with five Trolls.

Five surrounding him.

Five Trolls had formed a ring.

A siege formation. Demon Creatures were cleverer than you might expect, and Trolls especially so. They knew how to fight using their own regeneration. They could not match Frog for tactics, but they knew how to encircle a single human.

All five held thick wooden clubs.

Where they had found those clubs was a question, but that was not what mattered right now.

Between the five Trolls, Rem twisted the corner of his mouth. His smile was visible through a gap between two of them.

Then his axe moved. It never met a single club, it moved like a salmon swimming upstream against a river's current.

A few strokes of the axe later, five Troll heads floated free in the air. No Demon Creature lived through a severed neck, so that was that.

Rem walked out through the five bodies leaking dark blood and spoke.

"Just because every side is blocked, does that mean there's nowhere to go? No. There's always a gap. Give up, and that's when you die. You idiots."

His way of drilling his unit was already well known. Men who could not be called anything less than rough answered with one voice.

"Ha!"

He had them answer in fighting grunts too.

"Right. Sorry for feeding you such sloppy Demon Creature blood."

Rem said it to his axe, then caught Fell's eye.

"Everyone is to gather this evening."

Again he left out who was calling, and again everyone understood without being told.

"Could've called sooner."

Rem bared his teeth in a grin. Fell's stomach turned at the sight.

The air shifted. Rem's Pressure bore down on the surrounding area.

"We're all going to die, Captain!"

Someone in the unit shouted. Rem kept smiling.

"Hold. Nobody dies from this much."

If it was rough on Fell, how easy could it be for people who were not even knights?

That was not his concern, though. Another unit's training was not his to interfere with. Besides, Enkrid's own guard was probably putting themselves through something just as brutal.

"Then."

Fell said his farewell and headed back. It was summer, so the sun stayed long. With the late evening glow still in the sky, they lit a bonfire.

Crackle, crackle.

Meat went on to roast above it. Fruit and jerky were spread out alongside. Krais had brought them. Abnaier sat with the group as well. The elf and the witch came too, though Fell had not sent word to either of them. They simply knew.

Enkrid spoke to everyone gathered, in the same tone and manner he always used.

"We're going after a Balrok."

The words were anything but ordinary.

Yet not a single person tried to stop him. Not one of them looked caught off guard.

Frog nodded first.

"Been waiting."

Fell felt something close to the same. Strength had come into his hands. It would be a lie to say he did not want to swing it.

He wanted to test his own limits. If that was true of Fell, it was probably true of the others as well.

"Been waiting, I have."

Rem said it with a smile. Ragna started gathering his sword without a word and stood up.

"Where are you going, brother?"

Audin asked, watching him. Ragna looked plainly at Enkrid.

"The Balrok, are we going now?"

In the middle of the night, with no idea where they were headed, how did he plan to find anything?

"I'll lead the way."

Ragna said it with full confidence.

"And you know where it is?"

Rem asked.

"Walk far enough and it'll turn up."

Enkrid cut in before Ragna could go further.

"Not right now."

He meant every word about going after the Balrok. Just not tonight. He had shown his resolve, nothing more.

The resolve not to remain in just another comfortable today.

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