WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator: Hydrogen B
Editor: Abstract
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES
Chapter 440: Deserter Jack Is Already Dead
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The brown-haired woman’s eyes sharpened.
“I agree.”
Ruagarne spoke from behind. After going through the trouble of bringing him here, what was this nonsense?
Enkrid did not cut in right away.
Experience had taught him that much. Add a few words at times like this, and things usually got worse.
“Do you have a girl? Maybe Eisia?”
“He can be my spiritual spouse. I already have a fiancee and a pet cat in the main unit.”
The brown-haired woman and Ruagarne kept talking without pause, with Enkrid between them.
“That is too much, my lady. Right in front of me too.”
A man beside them suddenly spoke up.
He whined in a deep voice, and it did not suit him at all. If whining in such a blunt tone could be called a talent, then yes, he had one.
The woman burst out laughing and smacked his back a few times.
It looked very awkward to Enkrid.
The man was smaller than Audin, but still huge, while the woman was not even half his size.
Her hand patting his back looked tiny.
Of course, that was not all.
Enkrid’s eyes shifted to the woman’s palm.
He simply watched in silence.
There were calluses on her hand. The kind that only came from gripping and swinging a sword for years.
He looked over the man getting hit too.
A huge frame, a rough face, a whiny tone, and a body honed to the limit, muscles carved as clearly as sculpture.
Last, he looked at the woman with short blond hair and sharp eyes.
Her gaze met his.
The brown-haired woman noticed where he was looking and said, “Is she your type? You like dangerous ones, huh? But wow, he really is handsome. Looking at him is fun by itself. Hey, the Border Guard guys have it good!”
She was the type who only said what she wanted and ignored everyone else. She spoke and tapped her cup against the table, bang, and somehow it was not grating. It landed like perfect rhythm.
“I am Enkrid of the Border Guard.”
He introduced himself simply.
He had given up long ago on clearing up every misunderstanding caused by Ruagarne’s words. Nothing he said here seemed like it would be heard anyway.
And that did not matter.
If Enkrid had seen this brown-haired woman on the street, he would have taken her for an ordinary person with a common face.
Knight Oara tilted her chair back so only two legs touched the floor, draped her right arm across the backrest, and answered.
“Oara of the Red Cloak Knights.”
She was a knight, naturally.
She looked different from what Enkrid had imagined, but he had seen no opening in her since he arrived. She was the real thing.
“You are a provocative one.”
The short blond at her side said it while spinning a metal cup in her hand.
For a moment, Enkrid pictured several responses in case that cup flew at him.
He had not meant to think that way. It came up by instinct.
He had gone through this more than once, so he caught what was happening right away.
Why did that cup feel dangerous?
Because the short blond was showing an intent to attack while masking her killing intent.
It was a trick Jaxon used often.
If Enkrid had not sparred with him countless times, he would never have felt that sly edge.
The cup was not the only threat.
So was the right hand of the whining man, now lowered under the table.
He is holding a weapon.
Even so, Enkrid did not look that way. His eyes stayed forward, on Knight Oara.
He added intent to instinct and deliberately let his pressure spill out.
He had been doing it for a while now. That was why those two reacted.
Knight Oara brushed all of it off. More precisely, she ignored it.
“Drop it unless you are possessed by some evil spirit that died because it could not fight. You are good, I can see that, but those two are good too.”
Oara said it flatly.
“If it is a spar, I am always willing.”
Enkrid answered calmly.
“You are like Millio.”
The man met his eyes and replied.
The woman spinning the cup quietly withdrew her pressure.
Knight Oara smiled and said, “Still, you really are handsome.”
The conversation jumped in impossible directions, but Enkrid knew many people like this.
Rem, Ragna, Jaxon, Audin, and more.
So he was used to it.
“I hear that often too. Could I ask for one spar?”
“Oh? A stubborn obsessive man. I see that type all the time in the novels I read.”
“I am stubborn, yes. I want to learn a move from a knight.”
“You do have a vicious side. I like that too.”
If Knight Oara talked in her own way, Enkrid did the same.
Eisia, watching nearby, felt like she was looking at two lines that would never meet.
“Enough. Let us talk about work first, Master.”
The knight was also the teacher of all the knights, so they called her Master.
“Ah, work?”
Only then did Enkrid sit down and listen to something close to an explanation.
Unpredictable Knight Oara abruptly started on the alcohol ban.
“So what, with this much work to do, people still want to sit around drinking? We do not even have enough hands to clean up the mess from that incident.”
“Then why are you drinking?”
Ruagarne, always digging into the unknown, asked with open curiosity. Thinking about it, no one here had looked surprised by Frog standing behind Enkrid either.
“Because I am also the one in charge of this city, and its lord.”
Oara sounded proud.
Ruagarne thought for a moment, then accepted it. That could happen.
When people reached higher rank, some of them did whatever they wanted. She knew humans well.
Enkrid felt like he was seeing a free spirit that stood outside any fixed mold of what a knight should be.
Even so, he was not flustered.
How could everyone in the world be the same?
More than anything.
‘Does it matter?’
That thought passed through him too. What mattered was that she was a knight, and her skill was real.
And though she never said it out loud, she was doing something for this city.
You could not see all that by looking at Knight Oara alone, but you could tell from Eisia and the others.
Eisia was clearly exhausted, yet she respected Oara and admired her.
As a knight and as a person.
It was the kind of respect from the heart, the kind she did not show even to Crang.
The other two were the same.
It looked like more than respect, more like trust.
Oara drank, talked in a mess, called him handsome, acted like a fool, and still their eyes and attitude never changed.
What kind of person someone usually was, you could tell by the people around them.
He had learned that while wandering the continent. Enkrid lived with those lessons carved into him, so he never looked down on others by habit.
He focused on one thing only, that she was a knight.
And he had not forgotten why he came here.
“Is the situation worse than I expected?”
Enkrid read situations quickly. If he could not do that, he would never have survived this long.
Since taking up the sword and running toward his dream, he had done things close to suicide over and over.
To stay alive, he had to use every part of his surroundings.
That was how he survived, and how he forced dangerous, difficult things to work somehow.
Those experiences still helped him now. They gave him the eye for reading situations.
“It is bad.”
Eisia nodded and laid it out.
“Those deserter bastards are a problem, but while we were busy blocking Demon Creature waves, three new colonies dug in.”
So meeting spell-casting harpies earlier had not been random, and seeing smart Magic Beasts was not strange either.
Colonies always raised the level of Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts.
Oara was chewing golden roasted broccoli.
She acted like none of this was a big deal.
With broccoli still in her mouth, she spoke again.
“There are a lot of deserters this year.”
“Not just a lot. We are right on the edge of not having enough hands.”
Eisia answered, and Enkrid pointed out the most critical thing in all of this.
Deserters and colonies were problems, yes, but all of it came after surviving the wave of Demon Creatures coming from the Demon Realm.
From what he saw, that was the most dangerous and most important issue. West of here was the Demon Realm frontier, and this city existed to hold that line.
“How are you stopping the Demon Creatures coming through the west gate?”
He asked, and got a plain reply.
“I stop them.”
Enkrid truly wanted to see her fight.
A knight who said she would block the Demon Realm wave alone stood in front of him.
Could a knight of Azpen, the Mercenary King of the East, Ragna, or Sinar do that?
Right now, it did not feel like it.
It sounded like something only this ordinary-looking knight before him could do.
“May I watch?”
“Finish your work and come back, and I will seat you in the very front. But protect your own body. If you die, it feels like half the women in the world will become my enemies.”
In the end, Oara still joked. Enkrid had adapted by now and answered back.
“If it gets dangerous, will you not protect me?”
Oara had not expected that and burst into loud laughter again.
As she laughed, the man beside her rounded his lips and said, “You got some skill?”
It looked like this side had its own way of measuring skill through jokes.
By that standard, Enkrid might become the greatest knight on the continent.
“Not bad.”
The short blond junior knight, smaller than Oara, nodded.
“Eisia, organize the work and hand it to them. I am getting drunk today.”
Oara finished speaking, and Eisia bowed her head. Oara set the chair down with a tap and drained the cup in her hand.
That ended the meeting. Once outside, Ruagarne asked,
“So?”
No context, but Enkrid understood at once. He was asking how he felt after seeing that knight.
“I do not know.”
“You do not know?”
“I need to see her fight.”
He was curious about her battle. Even more curious about her sword. What would her tactics be like? What was her level as a knight? Knights were not all the same. Everyone moved on a different track. He knew that now.
So.
‘I cannot even guess without seeing it.’
He badly wanted to see the sword of the knight who gave off not one trace of pressure on the surface.
Longing boiled inside him.
He had already faced four knight-class swords, and still this thirst was not filled.
Even then, instead of impatience, he let that feeling bloom into pure zeal.
‘If this is talent too.’
Watching him, Ruagarne became very curious what would happen if this man truly became a knight, if he started using Will like one.
She could not predict it at all.
Even now he looked like he had already hit a limit.
That was why it would be more fun. Making what could not be done become possible, then reaching an end he could not imagine.
Ruagarne felt a shiver that would have raised goosebumps if she were human.
Her skin turned red instead. A Frog trait. She was moved all by herself.
For that, she decided, she would do her very best.
Eisia still looked tired, but she did not bother offering excuses for Lord Oara.
She knew Enkrid.
He was not the type to see this behavior and dismiss or belittle someone.
If anything, once he got curious, he would want to stay close and learn.
Just as expected, he was already showing that.
Dunbakel, listening nearby, asked,
“You are going into the Demon Realm?”
Dunbakel did not look frightened, but there was faint worry in the voice. At the same time, Dunbakel tried to sound even calmer, like someone hiding fear.
“If I get the chance.”
Enkrid answered cleanly. If he had not expected that, he would not have come this far.
Dunbakel swallowed without making a sound. Nothing had even started yet, but part of her already wanted to run.
“Now then, this is the list of requests we need solved. Not one or two. If we clear even half, we can breathe again.”
“Tell me.”
Eisia did exactly as Enkrid said.
The requests split into two major branches.
One was deserters.
She said this year was especially bad.
To Enkrid, lots of deserters made sense. The battles kept dragging on with death waiting the moment things went wrong, supplies were not solid, and pay was not high either.
Compared to Border Guard field soldiers, it was less than half.
Then again, they said this was still better pay than soldiers in many other regions.
At this rate, they should lock soldiers up to keep them from running.
“If you cage them, do you think they will fight properly? That is what Lord Oara says.”
Enkrid roughly understood Oara’s method.
Keep only those who would fight. Sift them through a screen, leave only those who could truly fight and whose hearts were strong.
Anyone else would break and fail to fight anyway.
The human mind was not that tough.
Stand too long on the edge of death, and it cracked.
Fear that tomorrow might be your last day, and a life where the comrade beside you kept getting replaced.
People needed proper rest to stop that from happening.
There was a reason the Border Guard once rotated two battalions while fighting Azpen.
It was to avoid nonstop combat. Battle fatigue ate the mind before it ate the body.
Before she even got into the second problem, the Demon Creature colonies, Eisia vented first.
“Among the deserter groups, two are serious, and the worst is a bastard called Swordsman Jack. That bastard hit our rear supply merchant convoy.”
Thousand Brick was land where not even a grain of wheat grew. Hunting or gathering food was hard, and they depended on supplies for everything, yet deserters attacked the convoy sent from the capital.
Some deserters ran quietly after leaving, sure, but she said freaks like this showed up once in a while.
They wanted to rob something before running.
Why did that happen? Because more than half the soldiers dragged in by conscription, not volunteering, were criminals.
The capable ones among them quickly formed groups, looted hard, then bolted.
“It would be best to deal with that bastard first.”
Eisia explained who Swordsman Jack was, and Enkrid answered.
“I think I killed him on the way here.”
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