WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 443

= = =

Enkrid had faced blades coming from outside the range of perception before.

Jaxon had done it to him again and again.

This was no different.

Outside perception. The speed was such that Aoara's words reached him only after the fact.

"Belly."

A single word landed in his ear. And the blade came ahead of it, slicing across his midsection.

Focus Point and Sense of Evasion activated.

Enkrid shifted his weight by pressing down through his heels. He pushed against the ground with his soles and moved backward, and the moment he thought he had dodged, Aoara's face came into view.

A faint smile. The corners of her mouth had lifted higher than before.

"Knee."

Enkrid realized the blade that had swept across his belly was an illusion.

Like magic conjured through Will.

No, he had experienced something like this before.

It resembled the sword Sinar had shown him, the one shaped from concentrated energy.

This time, though, it was done purely through pressure and suggestion.

The word left Aoara's lips at the same moment.

A blade aimed at the knee drove straight down from above.

Enkrid didn't try to dodge. He swung his sword in a diagonal arc.

Bottom to top, a whipping slash that cut through the space where Aoara had been standing.

She slipped clear of his blade without changing the trajectory of her own sword.

The downward thrust continued unchanged. She had only twisted her body aside, keeping her right arm right where it was.

Tap.

The tip of her sword touched his knee.

No wound. Just a mark on the hem of his clothing.

"That's it for today!"

Aoara called it out like a proclamation.

"Hah, hah."

Enkrid let out the breath he had been holding.

Aoara sheathed her sword with a clean snap and stepped close. She studied him for a moment, then smiled with her eyes and tapped his cheek twice.

"Stings a bit, losing to something that simple?"

Enkrid knew she had shown him only two sword strikes.

The first was the slash that seemed to cut at his belly. That was the feint.

The second was the vertical strike aimed at his knee.

The match had been decided on that second one.

He had felt many things, but he knew which of them mattered most.

'Her experience is on a different level.'

Aoara was seasoned.

Not someone who had just risen to knighthood, but someone who had lived at that height for years. Her veteran quality showed through everything she did.

"How old are you?"

Enkrid answered in the Thousand Bricks way, returning a question for a question. He had adapted quickly.

It was half a joke.

At that, the smile around Aoara's eyes froze in place.

"I let you off because you're handsome. Have you never been taught that asking a lady her age is how you earn a hole through the skull?"

Enkrid said nothing, and Aoara laughed and walked past him.

"Ah, I'm starving."

As she strolled away, Ruagarne came over.

"She hit the knee, so you'd have lost mobility. Even without finishing it, you would have lost."

"I know."

"The two moves are simple, but there's a plain truth behind them."

Ruagarne said it and waited. Enkrid thought it over on his own and arrived at his answer.

"If you're faster and stronger than your opponent, they can't stop you."

That was what knights were.

Push the thought further and it meant she had the confidence to subdue people with nothing but simple movements.

Not flashy, just plain. But a plain blade was no less lethal for being plain.

Swinging gently doesn't turn a blade into a handful of cotton. He had already understood that truth himself.

In other words, if an efficient sword could win the fight, that was the right way to do it.

"Correct."

Ruagarne nodded.

Losing brought no despair. Nor any satisfaction, but that was fine.

Enkrid washed up roughly, ate, then went looking for the tavern owner.

"No bugs here."

Ruagarne complained about the food on the way. There was nothing that suited a Frog's palate, so the complaint was fair.

Enkrid caught the eye of the owner sitting behind the bar and the man came over.

The tavern was quiet. The alcohol ban had seen to that.

"Do you know where those sham-cult types are? The Cultists, or whatever they call themselves?"

"More importantly, go tell Knight Aoara to lift the damn drinking ban. I'm going to starve to death."

Most daily needs were handled through Contribution Points, but a few things were not. Krona changed hands for those, naturally. Merchants passing through paid in Krona to stay, and alcohol and the pleasure quarters were no different.

The tavern owner complained about his lot and Enkrid ordered something special.

"One plate of roasted larvae, please."

"...Where would I even find those... well, I suppose that's my problem to sort out."

Clunk.

A small pouch dropped onto the bar top mid-sentence, its mouth falling open to show a glint of silver. The tavern owner had quick hands.

"Tomorrow lunch is fine."

A dozen or so silver coins gleamed on the bar. The owner pocketed the Krona and told him what he knew.

There was not much of value in it.

Eisia had also said roughly where they might be, but they moved around like nomads.

What was there to eat out here that kept them wandering? Think about it simply enough and the answer was obvious.

They were out there gathering followers for their sham cult. A few deserters here, a few people who couldn't survive near the Cursed Ground there.

That was how they worked, finding people whose hearts had softened and wedging their ideas into the cracks.

Once the numbers grew large enough, the plan was to run somewhere far off and live comfortably.

Well, why they were here wasn't really the point.

The point was that they needed to be dealt with.

A full day of walking the city had not turned up much.

"You're going to have to find them on foot yourself."

That was the most useful thing he heard all day. Millio had said it.

Millio had also watched the sparring match between Aoara and Enkrid.

"Give me a round too, would you?" Millio said.

He was an eager one. Enkrid obliged.

Millio fought with a heavy hammer, blunt and straightforward, well-suited to smashing an enemy in a single blow, but when an opponent dodged or blocked, his follow-up was far too slow.

"Try gripping it like this and twisting here. How's that?"

"Ow, ow, that hurts."

Enkrid taught him a few useful footwork tricks and some joint locks to use between strikes. It was hardly what you could call Valaf-style Martial Arts.

Used right, those moves could exploit an opponent's carelessness in the gap left after a big swing.

While they passed the time that way, Rem woke up.

Late in the afternoon, Rem opened his eyes and said, "Those sham-cult bastards? They're about a day's walk from here."

An unexpected lead. He had spotted them while out looking for whetstones.

"...You saw them?"

"They were gathered in the distance doing something. I figured they were a bandit gang, but from what I overheard, sounded more like those sham-cult people."

"Do you know exactly where?"

"Do I look like some idiot swordsman to you? One who can't find his way around or read a direction?"

Rem glared with wide, offended eyes. He looked ready to yank out an axe at any moment.

Watching that, Enkrid wondered if there was any reason to wait.

It was his job to do anyway.

He had come as reinforcement to catch deserters and deal with the Colonies, hadn't he?

'A deserter turned cult leader.'

Even if the man had made a name for himself in this area, he was nowhere near the level of a Cult bishop. The most generous guess put his combat ability at squire level.

A small, elite group, and with himself, Rem, Dunbakel, and Ruagarne, there was more than enough to handle it.

They said the man used some strange technique, but instinct told Enkrid it was not a real threat.

It would turn out to be nothing more than a nuisance trick.

With this much force, it was close to overkill.

Enkrid assessed his own current ability honestly.

Besides, if things got dangerous, he could just pull back for a moment.

This was closer to a surprise raid than a mission with something to protect. Leave it too long and those people would grow harder to find, becoming a real headache.

So the words came out naturally.

"Shall we go now?"

The question already had its answer.

The sun was beginning to set. There was a saying that daylight favored humans and darkness favored Demon Creatures.

At night, creatures with strong vision who hated the light had the advantage.

This was that time. The sun was going down.

Of course, no one here was going to let that stop them.

"Just the four of us?"

Dunbakel asked.

"Is there anyone here you know?"

Enkrid asked back. There was no one else to bring. Conscript some soldiers?

They would obviously be more trouble than they were worth.

They left the city as they were. The soldier standing guard at the gate tilted his head.

"You're heading out now, sir?"

"Is that a problem?"

The man before him was a demon slayer, a hero of the civil war. The soldier shook his head.

He figured Enkrid's group was stepping out for a short walk.

Rem the barbarian had done the same the day before, gone out briefly and come back.

So the soldier gave them the code phrase they would need to get back in.

"No problem at all. Just shout in front of the gate, 'Red really is the color for cloaks.' That'll do it."

They couldn't let just anyone into the city in the middle of the night.

He would pass the information to the next guard on duty.

The soldier did that. The next guard nodded, and when their own shift ended without the group returning, passed the same message along to the one after that.

"They're taking a while."

"Can't imagine anything serious happened."

For ordinary soldiers, a junior knight represented an almost unreachable height.

A few Demon Creatures on the road wouldn't mean anything to people like that.

And there was a Frog and a Beastfolk with them on top of it.

Dawn came.

The morning shift soldier saw figures returning against the pale early light.

It was Enkrid's party.

"Open the gate."

Blood-soaked armor caught the eye. Black blood and red blood mixed together.

"Did you run into some Demon Creatures?"

"Something like that."

Enkrid said it and walked inside.

* * *

When they had first stepped out through the gate, Enkrid had thought it was only a matter of finding them.

Finding them was the hard part, he figured. Dealing with them would be easy.

"Which direction?"

"This way."

Rem led them. Clouds covered the moon and the surroundings were dark, but for the people gathered here, even the faint moonlight filtering through was enough.

"Want to learn how to track someone down?"

"Now?"

Rem's out-of-nowhere question made Enkrid ask back. Asking wasn't the same as refusing.

Rem had decided that finding the cult group here would be simple.

There was a reason for that.

Rem's eyes shifted to the Beastfolk. Dunbakel's eyes glowed gold even in the dark.

He had thought it for a while now, but they were a striking color.

Her sense of smell was also far beyond an average Beastfolk's. Rem knew that.

The moment Dunbakel felt Rem's gaze, her hand moved to the hilt of her curved blade.

"Easy, Beastfolk. We're smelling things, not sparring."

"That's the method?"

Enkrid asked from between them.

"Any reason to take the hard road when the easy one's right there? We've got a Beastfolk with us, and outside of her own body odor, her nose works like something supernatural."

Not wrong. Even Dunbakel couldn't argue with that and went along with it.

She twitched her nose toward one side and said, "There's a smell coming from over there."

The group moved and found a cluster of people. Figures with what looked like portable tents.

"Who's there?"

Someone was standing at the front picking his nose.

Enkrid answered with action instead of words. He stepped forward and swung his sword upward.

The blade rose vertically and drew a red line from the figure's chin to its forehead.

Pfft.

Blood sprayed and one body crumpled forward.

"What the hell."

The man standing right beside him, wild, spiky blond hair, spoke in a stunned voice. His voice trembled.

Thud.

The flat of Dunbakel's curved blade flew at that face.

She had been standing there watching it all.

"What, holding back?"

Dunbakel asked.

"No."

Enkrid answered and cut and stabbed at whatever came into view. He let the ones who ran go.

"The servants of demons have come!"

The cult leader appeared. One look and he was obviously someone who had sharpened himself through years of banditry. Enkrid read him with his senses.

Not a mage.

But he was doing something that looked like magic.

The man closed the distance and thrust out his hand. An invisible blade flew from it.

Enkrid had taken a similar attack from Sinar already, and again earlier that very day from Aoara.

Invisible did not mean absent. The energy was right there.

Ting. He drew his Gladius and deflected with a twist, and the cult leader's hand warped as though it were gripping a sword that had just been knocked off course.

Strange. It was exactly like watching someone hold a transparent blade.

Enkrid didn't hesitate. He lifted his sword and brought it down onto the man's shoulder. A blank, indifferent cut, like splitting firewood.

Crack!

"Aaaagh!"

The shoulder split and blood welled up as the cult leader rolled backward. The man's body moved fast. Even just now, Enkrid had aimed for the head and the man had still managed to shift out of the way.

"Damn it, please spare me. Please, spare me."

Nothing like the man who had been shouting about the servants of demons a moment ago.

"I heard the Cult was backing you?"

"That was a rumor I made up myself."

The man rolled his eyes around as he spoke, and Rem couldn't see why Enkrid was bothering to talk to someone like this, so while Enkrid said a few more words, Rem threw his Throwing Axe.

Whoom! Thwack!

The axe flew and lodged itself above the forehead like an ornament, and the body tipped back and lifted lightly off the ground.

Enkrid saw something fall from the man's hand.

He stepped closer. Something was faintly catching the torchlight.

"Not something you can get your hands on for a few dozen gold coins. Do you know who Carmen is? There's a reason people call him a master craftsman. When even one of those blades shows up on the black market, people kill each other over it. A few years back there was a whole incident when the Carmen Collection's third piece, the Katar, appeared, and the assassin guilds went to war over it."

Jaxon's words came back to him. Jaxon had told him what the Carmen Collection was, and what the last dagger in that set was called.

Invisible Blade.

An unexpected gift.

Enkrid pocketed the gift and headed back to the city. On the way, a few Magic Beasts attacked. It looked like an entire pack of wild dogs had converted wholesale into Magic Beasts, and there were quite a lot of them, but Enkrid cut and stabbed them all down.

Dawn had come before he noticed. Time to get back.

They returned, ate, washed, slept a little, then headed for the gate again.

"Finding a Colony? That's even easier. Looked at the terrain around here and it's pretty obvious."

Rem talked as they set out. The suffocating heat was unchanged. This region ran hotter and more humid than most places.

They had already seen with their own eyes how much trouble Harpies could cause when they formed a Colony.

Enkrid and his group moved right away.

Somehow it had turned into a rhythm of coming in during the day to rest, then heading out again in the evening.

"Going out again, sir?"

The soldier who had ended up working two shifts back to back was grumbling to himself when Enkrid's group appeared, the same time as the day before.

"Any problem?"

"No, sir."

Enkrid and his group went out. Rem had plenty of experience hunting Demon Creatures. Dunbakel's nose was sharp, and Ruagarne knew a great deal across many areas.

None of them were people who had trained and lived inside some organization.

These were people who had spent far more of their lives rolling through the wild.

Gathered together like this, with Dunbakel's sense of smell that bordered on the absurd, and with experience layered on top, finding the Harpy nest was nothing at all.

"There's a nasty smell."

"Good place to hide and easy to pack together. Obviously it's here."

Dunbakel and Rem said it one after the other. Enkrid looked up at the sheer cliff face rising before them.

The terrain in the Cursed Ground did whatever it pleased.

Should this be called a cliff, or a natural tower?

The circular column of rock rose so high that Enkrid had to crane his neck all the way back just to barely make out the top.

Rough estimate by eye told him that even ten Rems stacked together wouldn't reach the summit. In short, it was tall.

A few Harpies were already visible up there.

They used spells, but only minor wind magic, nothing worth worrying about.

"I'll go first."

Rem said it and pulled out his sling. Throwing Spears were not going to reach, but there was a barbarian here who could hurl stones more fiercely than any Throwing Spear.

Tonight was brighter than the night before.

Two moons traded off lighting the sky. A large one and a small one.

Under both moons, whoom, whoom, whoom.

The sound of something cutting air began.

That noise grew into a roar that tore through the atmosphere.

Whiiiing!

Through the moonlight, Rem began spinning his sling.

Soon a third moon rose above Rem's head. A full moon, made of sling.

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