A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 751

WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Chapter 751: Should I Just Cut Off His Legs?

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"So what you're saying is, you've created five sword arts, and all five of them are paths that lead toward becoming a Knight?"

Rem summarized everything Enkrid had spent the past several days explaining. Enkrid's eyes went wide at that. The emotion in those round eyes was surprise, not quite shock, but close to it.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Rem asked, irritation plain in his voice.

"You're terrible at explaining things, so why are you so good at summing them up?"

Enkrid said it with his eyes still wide. By now anyone would know he was doing it on purpose. Rem's expression soured.

"What do you mean terrible? The problem's with the listener. And put those eyes away."

"I'm just that surprised."

Still scowling, Rem twisted one corner of his mouth upward. A savage smile. He swung his axe.

The draw was too fast to follow. The timing broke entirely from his walking rhythm. It was an attack thrown out to be unreadable, not on the beat, but off it.

Enkrid responded without trouble. He had already drawn his sword and swung to meet it. A rising diagonal cut timed to the axe's trajectory.

Clang!

Iron met iron, two human bodies behind the steel, and a gust of wind burst outward from the impact. Enkrid's dark green cloak snapped back with a flutter. It was not a fight. Just a demonstration.

One exchange, and Rem spoke with a flat expression.

"So that's what you were talking about."

He was a little surprised, if he was honest with himself. Blocking an axe thrown without warning was no small thing.

He could no longer call this man beneath him. Not even a little.

The man in front of him had received his axe with complete ease. If Enkrid had dodged, Rem might have expected it. But he swung his sword later and still matched the axe's speed on contact.

It was not a prearranged spar. Meeting him with similar force and speed was proof that he could do even more if he chose.

Rem could swing faster and harder himself, of course. But the core of it was that Enkrid had grown beyond any comparison to what he used to be.

Rem set the thought aside and gave a short snort.

"That's right."

Enkrid's answer was simple.

In that last movement, Rem had stripped away every unnecessary variable and loaded all of his force into a single motion.

Enkrid had read exactly what lay behind it.

'A move so fast there's nothing to calculate.'

It was not that the timing was broken. Rem had simply ignored timing altogether.

His thinking optimized itself by instinct. A remarkable gift, any way you looked at it. To think all of it came down to two words: raw talent. That felt deeply unfair.

"Show us the Heavy Sword Style too, brother."

Audin stepped in. The days of explanations were finished. It had all started with the line, "Breaker is rooted in the Correct and Precise Sword."

Ruagarne had gasped in admiration so many times along the way that her cheeks had puffed up like she might burst.

"Show me more. So that's how you used tactical swordsmanship. I had a feeling, but still, remarkable."

She kept adding things like that.

Five lineages, each matched to its own sword art. The correct, the heavy, the deceptive, the fast, and the fluid.

Breaker and orthodox swordsmanship, Flash and the Sword of Chance.

Among those, the heavy strike had not been demonstrated yet. The others had been shown clearly, but a heavy blow was not something to display carelessly.

It could not be shown in the mindscape either. The mindscape could only hold predictable sequences, and since the heavy strike had not been shown at all, it could not be rendered there.

Naturally, Audin had been most interested in the method of loading force into a single blow, something about weaving Valaf Martial Arts together with Zaun-style Heavy and Fierce Sword.

Fell and Ropord watched with bright, eager eyes. Somehow the number of people on the move had climbed to nine.

"I was about to do exactly that."

Enkrid answered and turned his gaze to the Demon Creature walking toward them without any idea what it was walking into.

A Cyclops. A one-eyed Giant. Barehanded, but those bare hands could tear iron plate apart like freshly baked bread.

A creature like this appearing near a city would be enough to set alarm bells ringing without stop.

Getting this close to the southern Cursed Ground was probably why they were running into monsters they had never expected.

Or perhaps Enkrid's group had ground through every Ghoul and stray Demon Creature and Magic Beast in their path until nothing else was left.

Or maybe it was just chance.

None of it was Enkrid's concern.

He had been intending to hunt this creature anyway. He was only pleased that it had appeared on its own.

It was also a fine target for testing a technique.

The conversation wrapped up as the Cyclops closed the distance. Enkrid's feet moved forward. He stepped out to meet it.

"Watch."

He said it casually, a massive Demon Creature right in front of him.

The Cyclops's arms hung long enough to brush the ground, and its thigh muscles were as thick as an adult man's waist. It hunched forward, and the backs of its hands dragged along the dirt.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Long furrows opened across the dry ground in the wake of its hands. Even as its hands skimmed the ground with each light step, the hardened earth was scraped away. It was impossible to guess how dense and heavy its hide had to be to manage that.

"We're in for a good show."

Ruagarne pulled out a dried larva, chewed on it, and found herself a spot. She plopped down into a seated position on the ground. Fell and Ropord, both recently made Knights yet more driven than ever, spread to either side of Enkrid's position so they would not miss a single moment.

Both kept a hand on their weapons and lit the candle of concentration.

Their burning eyes said everything.

The Cyclops kept its one eye fixed on Enkrid as it closed the distance. No roar, no shriek. Tearing things apart with its hands was what it preferred over crushing enemies with noise.

Demon Creatures did not all share the same habits.

Enkrid walked toward it with long, even strides. No hesitation. No fear.

To the creature it must have looked like suicide, a small thing coming forward to be torn apart.

Crack. The Cyclops's feet dug into the ground. Its center of gravity shifted and power flooded into its waist. The arms that had been dragging the dirt snapped upward at a speed beyond ordinary human perception.

Two hands came in like hooks. Left targeting the waist. Right going for the thigh.

'Clever.'

Enkrid registered the Cyclops's state through his stretched, expanded awareness.

Not going for the head or throat right away. That came from experience earned in past fights.

It was why the longest-lived Magic Beasts were the most dangerous. They watched. They learned.

Knight Valmund Balpier of the Empire had confirmed that, not just as theory. As fact.

Enkrid passed through the Cyclops's hooked hands. Moving faster than the incoming hands was all it took.

He flooded Will through his entire body and drove himself into the creature's chest, slipping inside the reach of those arms.

Which also meant stepping into the space of a Demon Creature at least three times his own size.

The Cyclops opened its mouth immediately. Teeth showed, each one the size of a human fist, jutting in all directions like a crumbled wall. It was going for his head.

The arms swept through the air. The uneven teeth descended. The stench of something worse than rotting flesh was almost upon him when Enkrid's body began to turn.

Pivoting on his left foot, his body coiled like a whirlwind. The dark green cloak shrank tight and pressed flat against his back. To the Cyclops, it looked as though Enkrid's dark head was simply spinning.

From Focus Point to the expanded state where thought stretched and multiplied, Enkrid drew all of that concentration into a single point.

'Rotation.'

Pure physical conditioning had a clear ceiling. To push past it, to add more force, the path was clear.

He would not be satisfied with shattering a boulder in one blow. If he wanted more than that, this was the way forward.

He mixed everything he had observed, absorbed, learned, and practiced himself.

The experience of forging several sword arts had opened a new angle of sight in him.

'What's needed is one cut.'

His body twisted on the left foot's axis, coiling like a dragon. He tightened and released the muscles across his entire body and wove in point-burst.

'Only as much as the body can handle.'

His Will did not run dry, and pouring too much would shred the grain of the muscles themselves. He knew that from experience.

The rotation began at his toes, traveled up through his calves, used the waist as its fulcrum, converted into force, carried into the blade, and erupted upward. The edge drove into the creature's body.

'It cuts clean.'

The impression arrived through his split focus.

Duskforge, his Inscribed Weapon, had always felt like it lacked the edge of Penna. But now that he was actually swinging it, the blade parted the Demon Creature like cutting a boiled potato. The resistance in his hand was less than with any sword he had ever held.

The Cyclops was a Demon Creature, skin like rock, bones to match. Yet the blade entered and left the creature's body more smoothly than the silver-steel sword Aetri had forged.

He gathered the rotational force into the cut, then stepped cleanly to the side.

To those watching, it looked as though the blade had erupted out of the creature's body the instant both arms crossed.

Along the line the blade carved, black blood and viscera and brain matter ran down.

And like that, a creature worthy of being called a Nightmare across the entire region died. The Cyclops carried the nickname of roaming demon throughout the south.

Not an actual demon, yet saddled with the name all the same. Why?

Partly because of how powerful the creature was. But more because of how many people had died to its hands over the years.

Wandering types like this were harder to find and harder to kill than the stationary ones.

It had also had luck on its side, slipping past the hands of Knights for this long.

Enkrid split the creature vertically and stepped out. A few drops of black blood landed on the dark green cloak and vanished without a trace, absorbed completely into the fabric.

A living cloak. And the same could be said for the sword.

Enkrid felt that clearly.

'You resonated with my Will, didn't you?'

He spoke to the blade inwardly. He oiled it regularly, ran his fingers along it, and in those moments it had always felt somehow blunt. Yet the instant it was swung, it resonated with him like this.

It felt like fighting beside a friend who understood him perfectly.

So that was what Inscribed Weapon meant.

Inscribed, part of yourself carved into it.

"Brother, you called it Vortex?"

Audin said.

Those with the eye for it and the ability to see caught the nuance buried in Enkrid's single strike.

A blow that wrung out the entire body and detonated it. Like bending a branch to just before the point of breaking, then releasing.

'More precisely, you swing the branch hard as it releases like that.'

Or perhaps it was like sprinting forward with a drawn bow and loosing from three steps away.

At that distance, every ounce of force stored in the arrow would carry through.

Audin's eyes kept flickering. The technique touched the roots of Valaf Martial Arts and went past them.

"That was an excellent lesson."

Audin examined the dead creature's body. The traces of where the Vortex had passed were unmistakable.

The wound was not proportional to the blade's width. It was torn and shredded.

'He did not just drive the sword in. He detonated the Will inside too.'

Could something similar be done with divine power? To move past imitation and produce this level of force, what would that require?

This was the kind of thing that needed thought.

Audin was not the only one. Ragna was tracing the action backward the way he always processed things, reverse-engineering the meaning of each movement through a calculation that ran on talent and instinct.

Rem was doing the same. They all were.

They could have done this at the Border Guard well enough, but the change in surroundings had shifted their mindset, and the shift in mindset had changed what they saw and took in.

It would not be wrong to call this the most seriously any of them had ever dug into technique, sword arts, and training methods.

Enkrid taught what he had seen and learned to his unit members, and all of them, Rem included, had no resistance whatsoever to learning something new from Enkrid.

Watching everyone chew over what they had absorbed, Enkrid found himself learning from that too.

Looked at a certain way, it was a strange and wonderful thing. Sharing what each person had, then seeing and learning from each other in return.

"I heard it was somewhere around here."

Ropord murmured as they walked. At that, Enkrid and everyone else turned to look.

About four days after they had turned south, Ropord had pieced together a piece of information from rumors.

He had found an old Cursed Ground that local talk said was in the area. The simplest comparison was the Gray Forest near the City of Aoara.

Cases like this were not exactly common, but being this close to a Cursed Ground meant it was not exactly rare either.

A scholar had once said that approaching the southern Cursed Ground was like passing through a hundred islands.

Enkrid had seen the sea and had sailed in coastal waters, but a hundred islands was a comparison that did not quite land for him.

The meaning behind it came through clearly enough, though. Near a Cursed Ground, there would be roughly a hundred smaller Cursed Grounds scattered around it.

"If there really are a hundred, how many are you planning to clear out?"

At Rem's question, Enkrid answered without hesitation.

"All of them."

It was a declaration that he would do so if he could, not an unconditional promise.

Rem nodded. The captain had always been that kind of person.

If they hadn't encountered the Cyclops today, Enkrid would have tracked it down deliberately.

Leave behind a creature nicknamed the roaming demon? Not a chance.

He would have had to meet it out of sheer curiosity, if nothing else.

"Over there."

Jaxon pointed and Sinar nodded.

She had the sharpest senses in the group and the ability to identify what she was sensing from the nature of the wrongness itself.

Dense brown leaves packed the forest ahead. Not a Gray Forest. A Brown Forest.

But the color had a strange, unsettling quality to it.

"Nothing in there is edible."

Ruagarne said, puffing her cheeks out slightly.

They had not even entered the forest yet, but Enkrid could already see things squirming across the ground. Some resembled earthworms; others were rounder in shape. An ecosystem broken by the Cursed Ground's influence. Even the insects looked wrong.

A headwind came and carried the smell that had been sitting in the forest out to meet them. The stench of rot hit them full in the face.

"I heard this is where the Demon Creatures called Parasitic Worms have settled. They say that even someone above junior-knight level can fall victim if they let their guard down..."

As if following Ropord's words, a swordsman stepped out from inside the treeline. One side of the face was covered in brown veins and only the whites of the eyes showed.

Ropord revised what he had been saying.

"Looks like someone already got taken down."

It was clearly more Demon Creature than human at this point. Rem's hand did not hesitate. A hatchet was already in the air before anyone else had blinked.

The hatchet split the wind, moving as though it had simply teleported, and was an instant away from burying itself in the swordsman's head.

Clang!

The swordsman tilted a greatsword up at an angle and caught it. Enkrid had been watching the whole exchange and spoke.

"Don't kill."

"Why?"

Rem turned back to ask. Whatever that thing in front of them was, his confidence that it posed no real threat to him was perfectly clear.

"I know that face."

Enkrid said.

He was right. The name was Romen. Rank, junior knight.

Junior Knight Romen, who should have been in the City of Aoara, was standing here with his eyes rolled back in his head.

"Should I just cut off his legs?"

Rem asked.