WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 169: The Rolling Stone

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The Cursed Ground Holy Sect's goal was to turn the entire continent into Cursed Ground.

Why?

"What is wrong with Cursed Ground? Why can we not consider that within it lies the form we must evolve into, the change we must undergo? It is natural to fear the unknown. But avoiding it will not solve everything."

Utter garbage.

So why turn the continent into Cursed Ground?

"Because it is right."

Where else would you find a group that wore the word "fanaticism" so perfectly.

Reason? None.

Justification? Not a trace of it.

They just believed. They just said it must be so.

Faith without foundation, without end. That was fanaticism.

Cultists were, plain and simple, crazy bastards.

No wonder the Inquisitors hunted them down with fire in their eyes.

The Cult had made multiple attempts to corrupt land into Cursed Ground, and this region was no exception. They sacrificed a hundred freshly caught young goats to gather Gnolls, intending to transform the entire area into a land of Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts.

The Cult had begun gathering Demon Creatures before the Pioneer Village was even established, so no one had seen it coming.

Originally, the plan was to build a Gnoll kingdom across the region. Somewhere along the way, that had shifted into raiding the village.

The palisades and watchtowers, the whole deliberately constructed Pioneer Village, could have become a small fortress given a bit more time. Such a fine target had walked right up to them.

"Our god has blessed us."

The Cultists genuinely believed that. Was this not a divine sign to fatten the Demon Creatures and swell their numbers further? Right there, the offering was carving itself up and presenting itself to be eaten. And so began the project of swallowing a Pioneer Village whole.

Not something to be done carelessly.

The Cultists poured themselves into it. They infiltrated mercenary companies under false identities, gathered more Gnolls, and called in those skilled in brainwashing and enthrallment. Low-ranking devotees and priests joined the effort. The Cult's sorcery was deeply connected to Demon Creatures.

Gnolls, Demon Creatures that mirrored the nature of hyenas, always fought in groups and always moved in packs. Naturally inclined to form colonies. All it took was a leader.

Curse and enhancement were poured into a single Gnoll. That was how they built their army.

Growing a colony into the hundreds couldn't be done in a day or two. This work was soaked in the Cultists' blood, sweat, and tears.

"We shall establish our holy ground!"

Shouted in the middle of the wilderness.

Pouring Krona into arming the Gnoll horde. Creating a leader and enthralling it with sorcery. In actual resources spent, it had cost more than running a Pioneer Village from scratch.

Worth it, all the same. Big returns require big investments.

This was only the beginning of what the Cursed Ground Holy Sect sought to accomplish.

While the Cult poured time and resources into its plan, the pioneer settlers built their palisade.

That was the truth behind all of this, unfolding along lines Enkrid had no way of knowing. Naturally, none of it was something he'd anticipated.

And so what.

Not his concern. Knowing wouldn't change anything.

Enkrid didn't care about the backstory. He didn't ask why.

Demon Creatures had come flooding in. That was all there was to it, and all he thought about was killing every last one. Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts. Kill them. Done.

"What in the... a Magic Beast horde."

Kraiss alone had managed to piece together a rough picture of the situation. A horde like this, assembled from the wilds and plains just like that? Armed, on top of it? With a spy planted inside the village?

What sort of insanity was that.

He'd put a knife to the Village Headman's throat, heard the wailing from beyond the palisade, and in the meantime done a rough patch job on Finn's wounds. After that, he'd scrambled up the watchtower to gauge the scale of the Demon Creature force, and the whole time he moved, his mind was spinning.

'The Cult.'

Cultist work. The biggest headache on the entire continent, bar none. Bound together in malice, driven forward by hostility. Look at that horde. What else could you call it but malice and hostility made flesh.

Roughly, but Kraiss had a sense of it: that horde was the product of the Cult's blood, sweat, and resources. Just a sense. Knowing wouldn't change anything, so he left it there.

'What does it even matter.'

Surviving was what mattered. From that point, his mind spun harder.

His conclusions, when he reached them.

'No trebuchet. No mangonel.'

No siege engines. Large-scale siege weapons were out of the question entirely. Was their manpower enough? Against the Demon Creature and Magic Beast numbers, it was clearly short. Significantly short.

It would be nice if the palisade held forever, but the Gnolls and Hyena Beasts numbered several hundred at a minimum, likely far more. Could they hold? Was it even possible?

Several Hyena Beasts were raking their claws down the palisade, trying to claw their way up. Keep raking long enough and something would give somewhere. A small crack becomes a hole, and a hole becomes a way in.

There were plenty of Gnolls swinging weapons too, pounding the walls, and plenty more hacking at them with axes. Countless little wounds were piling up on the palisade.

Was there any gap to be had? Could they plug it if something broke through?

'Probably not.'

At minimum, this was a fight with a time limit. They couldn't hold indefinitely. That was the conclusion. Which meant waiting for reinforcements.

He'd seen them keeping a few birds. Blue-feathered pigeons, the kind commonly used for urgent messages. Send one, and there was no telling how long reinforcements would take to arrive.

The conclusion was the same either way.

Could they hold?

Dread settled in. When he'd spoken of the palisade's sturdiness, what Kraiss had pictured was a colony of normal size. Thirty to fifty at most, that sort of scale. This was roughly ten times that.

"This is bad."

The dread surged. Instinct made him look for his squad leader. He found Enkrid moving, and there wasn't a trace of anxiety in the man. If anything, there was a quiet ease about him. Walking silently up to the top of the palisade.

Training-obsessed as his squad leader was, Kraiss knew the man wasn't oblivious. His head worked just fine. So when he carried himself like that, there had to be something he was counting on.

Either way, there was nothing Kraiss could do right now.

Patch up Finn. Take one good look from the watchtower.

"Hey, I hurt."

Finn's voice came from below.

"Coming down."

Kraiss climbed back down. He'd wrapped a rough bandage around it already, but there was a hole in Finn's gut. Somehow, by the narrowest margin, the innards seemed undamaged.

"I used the Ael Karaz-style gut-avoidance technique," Finn said, straight-faced.

Was there actually such a technique?

"Joking."

Making jokes at a time like this. Finn was clearly a piece of work.

"You sound like Rem's wife."

"That's an insult. I'm calling for a duel."

"Sure, go ahead."

Kraiss checked the wound again without much thought. Vigorous movement was going to be a problem. Still, it wasn't fatal.

"You'll live."

"For now, anyway."

Finn had picked up on it too, that unease about how long the palisade would hold.

"Yeah, well."

Kraiss brushed it off. If things went south, he had a way out. Cruel to those who'd be left behind, but that was the shape of it. All that wandering around inside the village hadn't been pointless. Kraiss always prepared for the worst. He'd already mapped out an escape route.

* * *

Running along the top of the palisade was a long archer's walkway.

Below it, Gnolls and Hyena Beasts packed tight, letting out their guttural cries. Practically a field of Demon Creatures.

"What in the hell. What is this."

"What's going on, why are there Demon Creatures? Why so many, why, no, there's just too many."

"Pam? Pam's dead. Wait, Ralph too?"

Demon Creatures and the bodies of comrades not yet cold.

When Enkrid climbed up, the Self-Defense Force hadn't done anything. Not one of them was drawing a bowstring. They were in a panic. The one small mercy was that nobody was screaming or soiling themselves.

Thud!

Groouk!

The Gnolls threw their bodies against the palisade and the gate. The walkway trembled, but nowhere near collapse. That was Enkrid's read of it.

Shoulders slamming, feet kicking, weapons hacking at the gate and walls with dull, heavy thuds. Still holding. This wouldn't bring it down. The palisade was sturdy.

The Self-Defense Force's nerves were not.

The sheer force of the Gnoll horde had broken them. Every one of them had swallowed their fear whole.

"...What in the world is all this!"

One of the militia. This place wasn't anywhere near the kingdom's center. Border Guard was already the northern edge, and this was a little further out than that. On the Pen-Hanil continent, this whole area counted as the north, so Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts were common enough.

That didn't make the current numbers normal. This was not something you saw often.

Fear. Pressure. The effect a Demon Creature horde had on the mind.

What appeared to be variant Gnolls picked up rocks from the reddish-brown earth and hurled them. Calling them rocks was generous, the things flying in were barely smaller than a man's head, slamming into the palisade with heavy thuds. Smaller ones sailed all the way up to where the defenders stood.

"Ah!"

The militia ducked behind the parapet.

He thought it again: the palisade really was built well. Kraiss had been confident, hadn't he, that an ordinary Demon Creature colony wouldn't bring it down. Still, left alone long enough, it would break. Nobody had designed it to hold against numbers like these.

The gate groaning. The militia holding in front of it. This was no good. Let fear consume them and it was over. Wait passively for the wall to break and death was all that waited. Everything since morning would have been for nothing.

"If you're not going to shoot, hand it over."

Enkrid climbed the steep steps and held out his hand.

"Huh?"

"I said, if you're just going to watch, hand it over."

He took the bow from the dumbfounded militia member standing right beside him. A shortbow, short arrows. Not for long range, but with Demon Creatures packed wall to wall out there, all you had to do was shoot. Even a sloppy shot should find something.

'It's been a while with the bow.'

He'd learned the basics of archery at some point. Enkrid plucked the string a few times, let the muscle memory find itself, and moved his hands. Left hand on the grip, arm extended and aimed, arrow nocked and drawn. The bow bent with a creak. There was no shortage of draw strength.

He aimed loosely at a Demon Creature and shot.

Thud!

Just as a Gnoll came slamming into the palisade with its shoulder again.

Twang.

The two sounds overlapped. The arrow whistled out and planted itself. Right in the ground, missing every single Gnoll and Hyena Beast out there. It snapped immediately, kicked and trampled by the passing Gnoll mob.

'Huh. I missed.'

He'd aimed properly.

"You're not bad in a fight, but is this your first time with a bow?"

The team leader came up behind him and said it. The same man who'd tried to talk him down despite his own panic, who'd come at him while still worrying about the others. Through several loops of today, Enkrid had confirmed it: the man had decent nerve.

He proved it again now.

Thud!

Groouk!

Between all the noise, you had to raise your voice to be heard. Enkrid cupped his ear.

"What was that?"

"Pretty sure you heard me."

That was who this team leader was.

"Didn't catch it."

The team leader pulled his eyes away from Enkrid and moved past him. Drew in a sharp breath, braced his stomach, and shouted.

"You all just want to die today, is that it?"

The man had a tremendous set of lungs. The cry punched through to every member of the militia.

"Forget Pam! Is now really the time to be stuck on a dead comrade? Can't you see what's urgent right in front of you? Pull yourselves together! Pick up your bows!"

Kraiss had said as much. That the discipline on this side was properly maintained.

Just then, Deutsch Fullman climbed up from the ladder on the other side. What had his nickname been, back when he led a mercenary company. One-Armed Glaive? No, One-Eyed.

Deutsch's face, eyepatch and all, came into view. He fixed his one remaining left eye on Enkrid with a hard stare, then roared.

"Shoot! The wall isn't going to fall! Get them all before those rocks hit you!"

No telling how many militia there were, but arrows seemed plentiful. And there were at least twenty archers.

"Excuse me, my bow."

The soldier whose bow Enkrid had taken walked over and held out his hand. Enkrid handed it back without argument. The bow really wasn't sitting right in his hands. Something to train later.

Twenty archers, or more precisely a little over twenty, began sending arrows down.

Groouk!

Ear-splitting Gnoll shrieks.

Thud!

Bodies slamming into the palisade like battering rams.

Thrum.

Thwack thwack thwack.

Nothing like Enkrid's shot. Arrows punched into heads, arms, and legs of the charging Magic Beasts and Demon Creatures without discrimination. Some wore crudely riveted leather armor, but plenty of the Gnolls were bare.

How they'd even gotten weapons like that was beyond imagining, but the count seemed to exceed five hundred. Arming five hundred soldiers like that would break the back of any ordinary lord. Something had gone very badly crooked here.

Someone's scheme?

Not Enkrid's concern.

What mattered for now was that the militia had pulled themselves together.

He watched the Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts dying to the arrows and let his gaze drift out over the horde. When he'd been running among them there'd been no time to look, but now he had room. The palisade was between them. He had time. No need to dodge Hyena Beast fangs.

Finding the target was easy.

Among all the variants, one small Gnoll stood alone at its ease, perched on a low rise in the earth. A colony leader always needed a position like that. To impose dominance through raw presence, it needed height and visibility, to lead from somewhere it could be seen. While the rest screamed and thrashed and raised weapons in a chaotic frenzy, this one alone was composed.

He'd already died to that thing more than once.

He'd gotten to the point of telling individual Gnolls apart by their faces, so recognizing it wasn't hard. Die a few more times and he'd be sorting them into attractive Gnolls and ugly Gnolls and ones with character.

"I'll leave this to you all."

Enkrid said it and climbed back down. Going down like that felt incomplete.

Groouk!

Even over the Gnoll cries, Enkrid shouted loud enough to be heard.

"No matter what happens, don't stop shooting! If you see a friendly, don't hit them!"

What kind of gibberish is that?

Deutsch, who'd been bellowing at them to put arrows into everything at the gate, turned to look at Enkrid. Said whatever nonsense that was and climbed back down, and not a word of it made any sense.

The man had cut down a few of his own soldiers, supposedly, and the team leader claimed those soldiers had been compromised. And one of Deutsch's own subordinates was nowhere in sight. Sharp kid, that one.

Not the time to go into it now.

Deutsch was a capable enough mercenary. When things hit their worst, he got his priorities straight.

Demon Creatures first.

After that, he was going to have a very direct conversation with that lunatic. Whatever was going through that man's head when he cut his own people down, the answer would need to be extracted by steel.

* * *

Enkrid couldn't read Deutsch's mind. Even if he could have, it wouldn't have mattered.

He stepped down into the group rolling and stacking wood and stone in front of the gate.

"Esther."

The panther who'd been guarding the gate all this time padded over. Enkrid asked, politely.

"Could you watch my back?"

One of the soldiers stacking the barricade glanced over. Why is he talking to a panther.

A short purr.

The panther nodded, as if it understood.

What the hell is that.

Even in this situation, you couldn't stop staring.

"Hey, what are you doing!"

A comrade called him back.

"Going, going!"

Time to get back to stacking the barricade. If the gate broke through, they'd have to hold it. That was when the close-quarters fighting would start.

He swallowed hard. Could he fight? He'd been trained, sure, but this was only his second time in actual combat. He was nervous.

Ugh. His knees went weak at the thought of that horde on the other side of the wall.

That was the state of things.

"From here on, everyone follows my command."

The rolling stone, the squad leader who'd come by order, the man who conversed with panthers, had come up without anyone noticing and opened his mouth.

"Can we open this gate a little?"

And that was his next bark. Not a word of it worth listening to.

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