WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 467: Calculating Eyes

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After that day, the road west was peaceful.

The wide plains felt vast enough to drain the spirit just looking at them, but it was not a bad journey at all.

"The sky sits high today. Days like this, you want to walk with your eyes up."

Rem turned out to be an excellent guide.

He had been away from the west for quite a while, yet he moved through it like someone who had never left.

"Has much changed out here?"

Enkrid asked, and got an answer.

"Why would it? This land is what it is."

So they walked on, watching clouds drift past.

The clouds scattered, gathered, scattered again, and vanished, over and over.

A high sky meant a day when the sky seemed to have pulled far away, so far that almost no clouds were visible.

Today was one of those days.

After drinking the prairie dog fruit, Enkrid picked up a strange presence.

It was near dawn. He was on watch when he felt a gaze on him, low and faint, but clearly there. The kind that only registered if you had a sixth sense for it, carrying a stealth that anyone else would have missed completely.

He searched for its source.

A small shadow flicked across the uneven ground and was gone.

After that, he felt nothing more.

He mentioned it in the morning, and Rem smiled and nodded.

"Pouch-peepers. About time they showed up."

"Pouch-peepers? I would have called them thieves."

Enkrid said it while wiping down Aker's blade and gathering the gifted weapons and the bow.

Breakfast that morning was dry rations.

On a long road, proper cooking was hard to manage, so they had been filling their stomachs with jerky, salt-cured meat, and dried fruit for days. Rem had said it would only take a few days to reach their destination, and somewhere along that quiet stretch of road was where Enkrid had felt the strange gaze.

"Think about how furious the owner gets when someone steals the fruit they spent so long ripening."

"There are owners?"

He had assumed the fruit just grew out of the ground naturally.

"Come on. Look over there."

Rem raised a hand and pointed at one of the dry-branched trees scattered across the barren plain. Enkrid had seen them a few times already, thorny branches, long flat leaves hanging from them, and those leaves looked nearly as hard as wood itself.

"That is the prairie dog fruit."

"Where?"

He could not see anything that looked like fruit.

"There."

What Rem was pointing at was the long leaves. Following his finger made that clear.

"Those?"

"Really?"

Dunbakel came closer, curious. She had been sparring with Enkrid regularly since their first bout, and her face was marked with fresh blue bruises.

Even beaten up like that, she said whatever she wanted and showed no sign of resentment.

"That is right."

The same was true of Rem, who had done most of the hitting.

The two of them held no grudge toward each other, and they did not exchange any particular warmth either. They just hit, got hit, trained, and hardened themselves. A strange pair to watch.

It seemed like the kind of time that ought to breed some bond between them, but Rem was always thorough. For him, it was as though women as a category simply did not exist.

"Prairie dogs carry the fruit off and bury it in the ground. The fruit absorbs the land's energy and grows from there. Finding ground where the energy is right, where the fruit can actually ripen, that is something only prairie dogs can do."

The west was full of rare and unusual things.

Enkrid now knew that the faint gaze he had been sensing was a prairie dog. Beyond that, everything he heard and saw out here was something worth learning.

And with all of it, curiosity had lifted its head.

That was the third reason he had come to this land.

"How do the other westerners fight?"

Whether sitting or standing, walking or stopped, holding a single thought in his mind was both his strength and his flaw, a strength because it drove him forward without hesitation, a flaw for the same reason.

Rem glanced at this sword-obsessed madman and answered.

"Some fight the way I do."

"And?"

"Some fight in ways nothing like mine."

"That is all?"

"Want to know ahead of time?"

Enkrid did not think long. He shook his head.

"No. Do not tell me."

In the old days, when his skill was poor, he would have needed every scrap of information, every detail about his opponent, just to survive. Otherwise he would have died.

But now he could afford to be a little reckless.

Which meant he could do this.

'Let me enjoy meeting them as they come.'

Not knowing and facing them head-on would be more fun. This was not a march toward death.

Rem grinned. He had figured as much.

Enkrid grinned too.

He understood what Rem had been doing.

Both of them held out a fist and bumped them together.

The flower of friendship was about to blossom.

"They will be interesting to meet. Ah, you might also end up furious, but maybe not you, Captain. That dumb beastfolk over there is probably going to get wrecked, and Frog might not get touched at all from the start."

Rem traced his memory as he led them along the path.

Out of the plains, keep the low ridge to the left, then walk a little above the direction the sun sets.

A small settlement would appear ahead.

Demon Creatures turned up every so often and caused headaches, but everyone who lived here was a warrior. By continental standards, you might call them rangers living on the frontier. In the west they were simply called a warrior settlement.

A gathering of people who all knew how to fight, and fought well.

Now it was time for faces Rem recognized.

'Hm.'

He drew a quiet breath. He was a little tense.

Among the people he would see again down this road, one of them would have every right to resent him, and that resentment was fair.

'What do I even say?'

Long time no see?

If he had known it would come to this, he should have picked up a few shiny stones or gems along the way.

If Krais had been here, Krais never would have let him go empty-handed.

He was turning those useless thoughts over in his head when it happened.

Enkrid's arm swung up and stopped Rem mid-step. Rem glanced at the arm across his stomach, then looked up.

The settlement he knew was still a little further ahead.

Between them and it stood something that required tilting your head back to look in the face.

Three of them.

The figures that had been badly hidden behind a low rise crawled out into the open.

"Did someone send us a lunchbox?"

"No, you idiot, we are the outermost post. Nobody sends anything here."

"Then what are those things?"

The three of them spoke as they looked the group over. Their voices were loud and deep as thunder, the kind that made eardrums scream if you were standing close.

Wire-like beards, steel-thick fingers, bodies broad as barrels.

Giants.

Three giants exchanged a few words with each other, then blinked.

All three were carrying thick dark brownish clubs studded with something like sharp spines.

"Do giants show up often in the west?"

Ruagarne asked.

To her eyes, using the Eye of Talent Assessment, those three were no easy opponents.

The group hesitated for a moment, and in that pause the three giants reached their conclusion.

"No idea."

"Looks like a snack."

"Let's eat."

The three giants turned to face them.

Enkrid had faced giants before, but never like this.

What did they say? Eat? Eat what? Us? Did they actually prey on humans?

"Frog tastes bad, so get lost!"

The giant in the center bellowed.

The rough shout rolled across the barren plain. Pressure radiated from it. Inside Enkrid's body, the Will of Refusal activated on its own.

"Grrr!"

Dunbakel's pupils stretched into vertical slits.

Swoosh, thunk.

Even in this absurd situation, Rem flipped his axe once and caught it clean.

Crack!

Ruagarne drew her whip and slapped it against the ground.

The sharp crack sent a thin cloud of dust blooming up.

The three giants advanced with heavy strides. At a glance they seemed slow, but that was only because of their size. They were not slow at all.

And then one of the three suddenly surged forward.

Accelerating, driving the club straight out in a thrust.

No one had expected that.

You thought they would bring it down heavy and dumb, and instead one of them thrusts? And after lumbering forward like that?

Surprise was surprise, but Enkrid responded without delay.

The sixth sense unified through Sensory Technique opened the way.

The blade of concentration born from Focus Point sharpened to a cold edge inside him.

After that, all that remained was to take the picture drawn in his mind and make his body trace it.

Crack!

Aker came free and hammered the giant's club, and the impact burst like a cannon shot.

Blade and club met and separated. Both weapons were pushed back at once.

Aker's edge bit into part of the dark brownish club and sheared a chunk loose. The piece tumbled sideways.

The giant lurched to a stop. The moment one stopped, the other two spread apart to either side and stopped as well.

Three giants forming a rough encirclement around the group.

Enkrid held his upswing posture and looked down at his feet.

Giant strength, sure enough.

He had detonated the Heart of Superhuman Strength just now, and his feet still slid back.

Rem stood to one side with his axe ready and tilted his head.

"What are you?"

Giants, ones that ate people on top of it, out here of all places?

Rem was genuinely puzzled.

"Raaah, scared, little runt?"

The giant said it in a tone meant to intimidate, the kind you would use to fool a child.

Rem had never been treated that way in his life.

He looked up and thought it through.

As long as one of the three survived, it could still talk.

From the way they had just come at the group, they were not operating on low intelligence. They knew how to use their appearance as a weapon.

Which meant they were thinkers.

Thinkers knew fear well.

"Keep one of them alive and toy with it."

Rem said it and let his axe hang loose at his side.

He tucked his chin, lowered his head slightly, and his upturned eyes burned.

Someone was supposed to be guarding this area.

That person was nowhere in sight, and instead there were man-eating giants.

What did that mean?

Something had happened here.

That was what was gnawing at him.

He drove his weight into the ground beneath his feet. The Heart of Superhuman Strength fired and sent power surging into his thigh muscles.

He bent his knees and loaded his ankles.

Crack, crack, crack.

The earth shook.

"What's that?"

The giant kept up its act of playing dumb, trying to draw him in.

Rem decided to take the bait.

Boom!

He kicked off the ground and launched forward. Some things he simply could not use when sparring with Enkrid, like running the Heart of Superhuman Strength to its absolute limit.

Not that it would mean he could beat Enkrid. Whatever he had been hiding, his captain had surely been hiding just as much.

The club dropped toward his head at exactly the moment he charged in.

Rem kicked off with his left foot and shot his body forward, then with that momentum already built, kicked down again with his right.

Not as explosive as the first, but more than enough to add another burst of speed.

A grappling strike he called the Double Jump.

The second step was not as thunderous as the first, but it was perfect for layering on speed.

He cleared the club and Rem's axe drew a line across the giant's body on the way past.

Shunk!

"Graaaah!"

The giant howled like a beast, and blood sprayed in all directions.

Giants were properly a species known as Red-Blooded Beasts, but these giants' blood was different.

Theirs was a deep violet, close to purple.

Amid the spray of blood, the giant screamed and lifted its foot to sweep through the space where Rem had been standing. Not a straight kick but a wide sweeping motion, which was itself proof that it knew how to fight.

Rem hammered his axe into the sweeping leg, used the rebound, and launched himself sideways.

It was completely intentional.

The direction Rem flew put him in line with another giant, which swung its club in a feint and then reached out with a hand.

Rem kicked that away too and dodged to one side.

Enkrid tracked all of that, and in that moment a giant stepped up close behind him.

"Got you!"

It swung the club in its right hand to cut off his escape route while simultaneously reaching down with the left to press on Enkrid's shoulder and pin him.

As it did it shouted "Got you!", and the sound was loud enough to genuinely hurt. Even that carried a small effect, a brief freeze in the body of whoever heard it, but that did not work on everyone.

Enkrid was already reading the presence. He turned and thrust Spark, then swept Aker upward.

Aker hit the club, and Spark opened a small cut on the giant's palm.

The giant had pulled its left hand back partway, so it ended up with a shallow scratch instead of a hole through the hand.

Pfft.

Deep violet blood ran from the wound Spark had made.

Clearly not red blood, to anyone watching.

"Where did something like you crawl out from? I will not forgive this! You!"

The giant roared in fury. Enkrid stared straight into its eyes.

The eyes of a furious giant were cold.

Cold as Krais's eyes when counting coins in front of a pile of Krona.

Those were calculating eyes.

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