WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 174: The Provoked Frog, the Panther, and the Man

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The alarm bell rang. No one woke.

Those already awake cannot wake again.

Everyone had spent the night with eyes open. Word that the Gnoll pack was coming again had done that to them.

The demon creatures and Magic Beasts had returned.

This time was different.

They filled one side of the wilderness as they rushed in, and among them were things no one had seen before. Two or three at a time, long objects tucked under their arms, closing the distance. Long things, riddled with holes through the middle. Tools, for lack of a better word.

Not the mindless charge of last time, either. There was a semblance of order to it. Dozens of such groups bunched together.

Deutsch did what he'd been taught back when he first entered the mercenary world, by someone with a military background. He curved his fingers into a circle, counted the Gnolls inside it, then estimated how many circles fit across the whole expanse.

'Twenty.'

Roughly twenty per circle. Maybe fifty circles. Something like that.

Between the Gnolls and the Hyena Beasts, a pack of ghouls writhed forward.

A terrible number. More than yesterday. And yesterday had already been a nightmare.

Everything was awful. But what was worst was what they carried.

Those long, hole-riddled tools.

"Ladders?"

The word slipped out on its own.

Doitchi Fullman felt the ground tilt under him.

The Gnolls had brought ladders.

Gnolls used weapons. Teach them enough, and they could figure out tools. What made it worse was that even at a glance you could tell these were thrown together in a hurry.

'They made ladders and brought them?'

No. What in the hell. Why would Gnolls be making ladders?

There was a sinister hand behind all this, people had warned. This had to be that hand's doing.

'Cultist.'

That made it worse. But right now, the ladders were the immediate problem.

Hastily built or carefully made, it didn't matter. The moment they were slung over the wall in numbers, quality stopped being the issue.

"Boiling oil!"

Deutsch called out before he'd finished thinking it.

"Do we have anything like that!"

The Village Headman's shout came back.

There were still some stones to throw, but not what you'd call plenty. Arrows too, a fair number, but were those enough to hold off roughly a thousand demon creatures?

When they were clustered under the wall, shooting meant hitting.

But with only twenty archers?

Pouring boiling oil like a siege defense wasn't an option.

Should they collect filth and pour that instead?

Would Gnolls or Hyena Beasts fall back just from a splash of waste?

Not a chance.

Seven days and reinforcements would arrive. But could they hold that long?

'If only there were enough stones.'

Twenty archers and every villager pitching in. What would that even amount to? Once the stone-throwing ran dry, the villagers couldn't be used as anything resembling a fighting force. Sending civilians into close combat with Gnolls was the same as tossing them a rare steak.

In a single day, you couldn't haul enough throwable stones from the quarry. No manpower, no energy for it. They'd carry what they could manage, but it wasn't enough.

'Not a chance.'

Once the ladders went up, it was over. Too wide a gap in numbers to stop with arrows and falling stones. If the Cultist started working his tricks, it was over then too. What could they do against a curse? They'd be lucky if everyone just fell sick instead of dying outright.

Deutsch himself had no real means to resist a curse right now.

Just a Pioneer Village. Just a former mercenary company leader. This was not a scale he could handle.

To be honest, Deutsch wanted to run.

Yesterday's victory had already faded from his mind.

The craftsman they'd hired for wall construction had apparently planned to name it something like Madman Enkrid's Wall. Fat chance. They weren't going to lay a cornerstone at this rate.

At this rate, the place would become a Gnoll colony nest. Their settlement. Gnolls, of all things.

Eventually a large punitive force would organize and burn it down fast enough, but the ones who died and lost everything in the meantime?

Deutsch had poured everything he had into the Pioneer Village. Stripped of it, he'd have nothing. Starting over from rock bottom, sword in hand again.

So should he run? Was that really it?

'Run where?'

Nowhere to go. If he fled through the quarry with his mercenaries, where would they go after? Cross the border? And how, exactly. An unprepared journey was no different from suicide.

And yet years of mercenary work told him that running gave better odds of survival.

"God damn it."

The words came out on their own.

That was when it happened.

"What was that guy's name again?"

"Deutsch."

Voices from nearby.

Last night's hero. The black-haired, blue-eyed lunatic squad leader. The madman who had plunged alone into the Gnoll horde and cut down their leader like it was nothing.

"Deutsch. Let's crack the gate open a little."

That was Enkrid.

Deutsch's brow furrowed and churned, riding every emotion beneath it, and Kraiss, standing nearby, spoke his prepared lines in a clear, bright voice.

"I trust you haven't forgotten that operational command rests with my squad leader. Following orders immediately, Security Captain of the Pioneer Village."

Nothing arrogant, nothing forceful. Just duty stated plainly. The effect was obvious.

The timing was flawless.

What choice do you have anyway? You can see for yourself, can't you? Count those ladders, compare it to when they first showed up. Isn't this moment worse by every measure? And then there's the Cultist. You're out of options.

In short, it was an exit.

Handing over command meant stepping out of responsibility.

By Kraiss's measure, Doitchi Fullman was dull, but a decent man.

'He'd be more at ease if he just gave up already.'

Guardian of a Pioneer Village? Security captain? What was there to get out of a title like that? Investing in the future? Please. This was a gamble, and plenty of Pioneer Villages had collapsed exactly like this. With things twisted this badly on top of it?

If it were Kraiss himself, he'd have taken his mercenaries, stripped the village to its bones, and run long ago.

Genuinely.

Of course, Kraiss couldn't actually do that.

If he had, Enkrid's blade might have come flying his way instead of a hand or foot.

Right. For whatever reason, the squad leader was dead serious about saving people.

Thinking about it made something churn inside him. The man had a talent for picking the strangest things to be serious about.

And here he was, same as always.

It had been right after the alarm bell rang.

"Just me, Ruagarne, and Esther go out."

"Where to?"

"Outside the wall."

That was what Enkrid had said while the alarm bell was still ringing.

Mid-fight yesterday, Kraiss had genuinely wondered whether Enkrid had taken a blow to the head.

"You know you almost died yesterday, right?"

Enkrid nodded.

"A bit close, yeah."

This bastard doesn't value his own life.

"Eyes forward."

The words left Enkrid's mouth the instant the thought crossed Kraiss's mind. Not wanting to get hit for no good reason, Kraiss looked away.

"What if luck runs out today?"

"Ruagarne's here."

Sure, Frog was extraordinary. But Ruagarne wasn't a knight. She wasn't. Which meant this was still dangerous.

"Figure out what you need to do on your own."

Enkrid said exactly that much and stopped. End of conversation. After that, Kraiss worked it out himself.

'The full frontal fight falls to one person, one Frog, and one panther.'

What could the rest of them do?

Cheering, for one.

'Could fire arrows at the right moments.'

Kraiss swept the brief thought aside. Time to focus on what needed doing.

"Then, having received operational command: open the gate," Kraiss said.

Enkrid was already down at the gate, chatting with Ruagarne about something. Esther trotted alongside them.

'Please don't die.'

Kraiss said it to himself. If the squad leader died, his own odds weren't great either.

In Kraiss's eyes, Enkrid was not a stupid man.

'He's got something figured out.'

Strange as it was, Kraiss trusted it. Somewhere in memory, a picture surfaced: Enkrid's back, standing between him and death in the middle of a battlefield.

He'd barely made it out alive that time.

The squad leader from back then and the one standing at the gate now, there was no comparing them. The promotion from squad commander to platoon leader wasn't the point. His skills had grown. He wanted to be a knight someday, he said, and the way he'd grown, it didn't seem entirely impossible.

"I said open it. Disobedience is punishable by beheading. Doitchi Fullman!"

Force entered Kraiss's voice. Something that hadn't been there a moment ago.

He was no mercenary captain, and he wasn't Enkrid. Just a weak man. Well, then, he had to borrow some authority.

"Y-yes. Right away."

Deutsch responded. A former security captain, freshly relieved of his responsibility.

"Cut the throat of anyone who disobeys."

Said to Deutsch, though there was no chance Deutsch would actually behead anyone.

Of course there wasn't.

The pulley turned with a groan, and the log gate creaked open.

Through it went Enkrid, Ruagarne, and Esther.

Not a reckless charge like yesterday. The Gnolls and Hyena Beasts held something like a formation this time. Off to one side, ghouls crept forward in a mass. And somewhere deeper in, the Cultist would be hiding too.

Three of them, facing what you'd have to call an army.

Looking at it made Kraiss's mouth go dry. Away from other eyes, he swallowed quietly.

Whatever those three were going to do, his job was to back them up.

"Bring every soldier who's confident with a bow."

The archers first.

"Pile stones nearby too. Anything we can throw at a moment's notice."

Soldiers and villagers alike began moving to Kraiss's words.

Log palisade as their wall, it was time to face an army once more.

* * *

Enkrid was glad Kraiss was handling things. One less thing to worry about.

'Would've been miserable without the treasure business.'

Without the map dragging him into this, there was no way Kraiss would have come along on a mission like this. And if Kraiss weren't here, Enkrid wouldn't have brought him.

All the small details of command, the odds and ends, he'd have had to manage those himself without Kraiss.

Doitchi Fullman, the One-Eyed Glaive, had the face of a man who'd had the fight knocked clean out of him.

'A face that says he'll barely hold on and then die.'

He'd seen that look before. A broken spirit, written plainly.

Enkrid noted it and turned his attention elsewhere. After that: the sword, himself, and the new understanding turning over in his mind.

This was that kind of time.

Standing before the log gate, last night's dream came back on its own.

The conversation with the Boatman, branded into memory. The Boatman's reaction. Everything that followed.

"You used a shortcut."

No feeling in the voice.

'As things happened.'

A thought, not a spoken word.

The Boatman understood it anyway.

Slosh. No waves, yet the small boat rocked up and down.

As if speaking for him. How dare you. A shortcut, that kind of thing?

Enkrid was calm.

"Shackled to law, adrift through time, regret will find you, this is not the end."

The Boatman recited what might have been a verse, and Enkrid let it wash over him. No point turning over words he couldn't understand.

In the waking world and in dreams alike, he only dreamed of tomorrow.

That was it. The Boatman vanished, and what followed was a nightmare: trapped in a well, the moon shining clearly above, close enough to see but impossible to reach. The same loop, again and again.

In the dream, Enkrid clawed at the walls until his nails cracked and peeled and lifted away, but the top never came any closer.

That was why he'd been thrashing in his sleep.

"What kind of dream was it?"

Ruagarne asked, watching the log gate ease open.

"A dream where the moonlight was beautiful."

Not wrong. The moonlight pouring down into that well had been genuinely lovely, enough to lose yourself in, even in a dream. The kind of moonlight that needed no wine.

"Doesn't sound like a nightmare."

"Does it not?"

A few words traded without weight.

"Kyah."

A soft sound from Esther at the open gate. He glanced sideways and down, and she was watching him.

"Count on you again today."

Esther was no ordinary panther. That much he'd already accepted.

So then, what about himself?

"Huu."

He steadied his breathing. Turned over what he'd learned.

Ah. There was something to confirm first. He'd almost forgotten.

"Ruagarne."

"Speak."

"Show me what you've got."

How well a provoked Frog would fight. Easy to forget. Worth reminding himself.

Gurgle.

Ruagarne's cheeks swelled wide.

"Fine, I'll show you."

Frog went first. Bang, she kicked off the ground, dirt spraying up like a fountain, and charged. How reassuring that looked.

He was curious.

How well a provoked Frog would fight.

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