WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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Chapter 787: Reflect, and Reflect Again

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Enkrid found himself privately agreeing with the Balrok's words as he sank inward and pulled out his Will. Whether he agreed or not, stopping was never an option.

He kept the drawn Will from moving on its own.

'Control.'

First came control, stillness. Then explosion.

He layered the point-burst the Zaun family head had shown him on top of the line-burst, digesting both methods of Will use in his own way before releasing them.

He put into that single swing a readiness to die afterward. A Knight's Will grows stronger through vows and limitations.

Enkrid threw aside any notion of steadying himself and charged. He had finished preparing long before he got here.

The moment his still body moved, he entered a world without sound. Time turned heavy, the air around him thickening like mud pressing down on his limbs. The Balrok slid into that same moment without trouble. Enkrid had expected as much.

But the Balrok had not yet folded his Wings. That was probably why Enkrid came out a breath faster.

Foot placement, the hand gripping the sword, everything became one as the blade swept through. The motion was a simple diagonal cut, but it landed before the Balrok's sword, Urtt, could close the distance, and before the fire serpent, Salamandra, could lunge.

The timing was right. His swing, Flash blended with Vortex, scraped across one of the crystals in the Balrok's chest.

Boom. Crack. Thud. Ring.

Sound erupted a beat late as Enkrid's body was hurled backward. Moving at that speed, the Balrok sent out another mental wave.

-Endure.

Enkrid flew back, rolled once across the ground, caught his footing, and stopped. In the process, Duskforge, which he had driven into the earth, dragged a long scar through the dirt with a grating screech.

"Ugh!"

The moment he stopped, he coughed blood. During the exchange just now, the Balrok's kick had caught him in the stomach and damaged his organs.

At the instant his diagonal cut landed cleanly, the Balrok had not stood idle. Rather than fighting the drag of his Wings and the air resistance to swing his sword, he had used his foot instead. His right foot struck Enkrid's abdomen with the same speed as his sword swing.

'A body that is itself a weapon.'

He already knew that, but this felt different. The force behind that kick, and the speed of it.

Bright red blood smeared his chin and dripped onto the ground.

Enkrid pressed one knee to the earth, using Duskforge as a brace where it was driven into the ground, and looked forward.

He reacted to the last thing he had heard from the Balrok.

"What?"

A few more drops of blood fell onto the black dirt along with the word.

Endure. Every Knight learned it, and it was part of the path toward mastering Iron Body.

At its core, it was a skill for enduring pain.

-Impressive.

Whatever Enkrid said, the Balrok was going to say what he wanted to say.

Enkrid looked at the Balrok's chest. His blade had definitely cut across one of those crystals. Yet the crystal showed no mark. Duskforge had cut not the crystal itself, but the barrier surrounding it.

'Underhanded bastard.'

The Balrok had told him his weakness in a previous run of today. The three crystals embedded in his chest, those were it.

What he had not mentioned was the thick Magical Barrier layered over those crystals.

'Well, I expected something like that.'

Just not this solid.

Endure, Will born from the power to withstand pain, was another suit of armor on the Balrok. It wrapped around the crystals.

'So this approach won't work easily either.'

Enkrid held the Balrok's black and yellow pupils in his gaze. His gut burned as though his organs were boiling.

At the last second, the elf's cloak had stretched on its own and wrapped around his midsection. Without that, he probably could not have held on even this long.

-To meet another human like this in such a short span of time. Remarkable.

The Balrok spoke.

Enkrid was not sure what he meant by another, but there was no time to ask.

The fire serpent came flying, and the black-flame sword scorched and slashed through Enkrid. The Balrok had lost interest in a broken toy.

He burned to death in black flame. It was not the first time, and it hurt just as much as the first.

Still, he had gained something. The barrier surrounding the crystals was tougher than he had thought.

'If I put more weight into the strike, I could cut through it.'

He knew it by instinct. But cutting even one crystal meant he had to die for it.

-Good eye. Very good.

The Balrok kept on admiring, and the scene before Enkrid shifted.

Ripple.

The Black River, the ferry, and the Boatman with his purple lamp came into view.

"Pitiful sight."

The Boatman mocked him, an invitation toward Despair and defeat.

The moment Enkrid thought he had stood up on the ferry, the Boatman shoved him back out. He was back in reality, in another repetition of today.

Enkrid woke, and before the other person could start with guest this or guest that, he raised his palm and said, "Wait. Hold on." He accompanied it with Pressure as a matter of course, then slowly nodded.

'Good. This works. If this approach fails, move on to the next.'

"Do you think I'm your dog?"

The other person shook off the Pressure and snapped.

The single-edge wielder got angry when ignored, and this one always opened his mouth before lifting a hand, trying to shake the opponent's composure. When that failed, he was the one who got rattled.

A predictable trick.

He was asking whether he was a dog to bait out a careless reaction. His eyes were not visibly darting around, but inside he was probably working frantically to find some word that would make Enkrid drop his guard.

"Weren't you?"

Enkrid answered easily and began thinking through another approach.

'The Balrok enjoys fighting. Any way to get him to lower his guard?'

None. Enkrid led with deception and lost again.

Grinding through a battle of attrition on inexhaustible Will? That idea had been crushed long ago.

He had learned things in the process, but the Boatman only sneered.

"What, do you think you'd be happier if everyone died together?"

If the fight dragged on, the Madman Knights would come from behind. Enkrid had not faced them directly.

He had only caught distant voices and sensed their presence.

"Fiancé!"

An elf shouting far too loudly.

"Having fun again without me!"

"If you're lost, shout. I'll come to you."

Rem and Ragna.

"Lord, is the prisoner you seek within?"

"Hold on, going now."

Audin and Jaxon.

That had been just before he died. He had been pushing himself to the absolute limit, and then he had failed to dodge the Balrok's last swing.

Dying, Enkrid had seen the Balrok's eyes gleam. The flames swirling in his pupils churned. Those eyes seemed to hold equal parts bloodlust and excitement.

The conclusion he drew from that:

Even simply holding on was not easy when the Balrok fought at full strength. Even when he focused entirely on defense.

He spent today again inside the pitch-dark cave.

'If I fight without hesitation.'

Enkrid's next step was to fight while throwing his own body away, unhesitatingly wielding violence that destroyed his own body. The Balrok matched him in kind.

-Good.

He even shouted in exhilaration. Urtt took Enkrid's left arm, and Duskforge finally punched into one crystal.

A blow thrown with his whole body. And in the process, Enkrid felt his Will shift slightly.

'Different again.'

Each time he crossed some threshold until now, he had noticed a subtle change in the quality of the Balrok's Will. It resembled what Ragna showed when swinging his sword at full strength.

In truth, he had glimpsed something similar in Rem and the others, but whenever he asked, they all just tilted their heads.

'You can't observe someone else's, so you don't know the difference between yours and theirs.'

By dying over and over, Enkrid had been able to stack the experience of observing both his own Will and others'.

That said, the members of the Knight order had not simply let his words wash past them. They each offered their own experiences in their own way.

"So you're saying the captain's Will is kind of plain, but ours isn't?"

Rem's words brushed through his mind.

"I've always preferred hiding sharpness inside plainness. It's a preference."

Jaxon had said that too.

"I add it because I'm going to cut. That's all."

That was Ragna's, which he apparently considered an explanation, though only he understood it. He had nodded to himself afterward, wearing the expression of someone who had just grasped something profound, which made it all the more baffling.

Audin had laughed and said something about how divine power originally ran in a slightly different direction, hadn't he?

"Want me to pour some elf vital energy into you? Come find me tonight and I'll do it."

An elf's joke surfaced in his memory, and he chuckled despite himself.

Back to reality.

"You're laughing?"

The man drawing a blade from his sleeve furrowed his brow, performing anger at being disrespected.

That was his specialty. This was the seventy-sixth run of today. He had broken one crystal exactly once.

Enkrid turned the man's ploy against him and thrust his blade forward. The streak of light shooting out like a Flash would look like a single point of light to anyone facing it head-on.

A rapid-accelerating thrust through point-burst.

Its foundation was the thrust he had learned facing the very first run of today, though comparing the two now felt almost laughable.

He was a moment away from killing the man. The man crossed his two swords and let himself fall backward as if collapsing.

In Enkrid's calculations, the man should have twisted sideways to dodge and aimed for a counter.

Instead he dropped back and kicked out with one foot. It was a move close to a trick, and years of training showed in every line of it.

Balancing on his left foot alone, he extended his right. A thin blade shot from the toe of his boots, aimed for the throat. Enkrid pulled back the sword he had been driving forward.

Clang.

The blade bounced off Duskforge and spun into the air, rising above both their heads.

Enkrid could have ended the fight before that blade even landed. In fact, he could have skipped the block entirely a moment ago.

'The throat would have been grazed, and that would have been that.'

But he had not.

Why? A whim? Or maybe he had needed time to think.

He had not crushed the man with Pressure this time.

'No.'

The attack the man had just shown was unexpected, and it had roughly overlapped with the Balrok's kick.

The man steadied himself on his left foot, stomped his extended foot back to the ground, rose, drew two Shortswords, and crossed them in front of his face. He watched Enkrid through the angled gap between the two blades.

He studied this particular guest who had arrived. The move he had held in reserve was his real ace, and it had been blocked. That froze his hands and feet.

'What is this?'

He stared, but the blue-eyed man was just gazing blankly at the air.

'Faking an opening?'

A trick he himself used often. Fighters who relied on a deceptive blade were suspicious by nature. He was no different.

'Where did this one come from?'

Startled, he kept watching, and then the blank eyes slowly came back into focus.

'He was actually lost in thought?'

What kind of lunatic is this?

"We never even introduced ourselves. Not that names really matter, I suppose. Your basics came from the Vallen Style Mercenary Sword? Let's keep going."

Enkrid's opponent, Rino, covered his mouth and throat with his two blades so Enkrid could not see, then quietly swallowed.

This one who had just walked in was completely out of his mind.

"I'm Rino."

"Said names don't matter."

Enkrid said it and swung his blade. Rino pressed back against the crossed swords on reflex, using the friction of two blades grinding together as an attack. At the same moment, sparks flared from the blades, which were forged with a special metal mixed in.

They were not sustained flames, but an instantaneous, flash-like burst of sparks.

A method to cut off the opponent's vision for a heartbeat. Of course, for anyone at a Knight's level, the five senses were sharpened enough that blocking sight was rarely decisive.

Still, when two blades were clashing at speed and your vision suddenly went dark, you hesitated for even a fraction of a second. The two spark-striking blades were built to carve out exactly that kind of gap. And Enkrid was, in fact, startled.

'Those blades.'

He had not realized they could do that.

Until now, Enkrid had cut Rino down and moved on too quickly to watch them closely.

'Reminds me of the Balrok's kick.'

That was the thought that surfaced.

The move just now, dropping back and kicking out, had felt that way. The force, the result, and the motion were all different, but the process had been similar.

'The Balrok uses deception too.'

He would do anything to win. Enkrid felt exactly the same. And he had grasped one more thing here.

"Even a farmer who has spent a lifetime working the land has something to teach you."

That was what the instructor who built his foundations, a very long time ago, had said.

"You probably learned something from watching Aetri work metal, even though he can't fight."

Ruagarne's voice layered over it.

'You're a good teacher, Rua.'

A fine Frog.

She did everything for her own desires. Teaching Enkrid was part of that everything. That teaching had carved itself into his bones.

'I got complacent.'

Time to reflect. The opponent in front of him right now, Donapha, the single-edge wielder, all of them.

These were Knights trapped in the Balrok's Labyrinth. He had things to learn from every one of them. He had ignored each of those chances and walked past.

'Too drunk on it.'

Was he just that excited to finally meet someone who overwhelmed him, for the first time in ages?

Had he unconsciously, without even realizing it, been treating each run of today as something he could afford to waste?

Even while telling himself he would not throw away a single run of today?

Reflect, and reflect again.

"Alright."

With his whole heart, he watched the opponent's techniques and stole what he could learn. Enkrid treated the man opposite him as a teacher in complete sincerity.

"This is good. Got anything else?"

Enkrid said it, and Rino spoke again in disbelief.

"You crazy bastard?"

Footnotes:

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