WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 476: Those He Took Quite a Liking To

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"Could I have saved her?"

A man with black hair and blue eyes. He muttered while kneeling on the ground. His pupils trembled, and so did his hands. His skin was dry and ashen, and the skin beneath his eyes was dark.

He looked like someone who hadn't slept properly in days. Like someone who had crumbled under the weight of regret.

Beneath his knees was a bed of sharp gravel. Blood seeped through his trousers, and he didn't seem to notice.

All he did was kneel there, eyes desperate, craving an answer.

Then one came.

"Yes. You could have."

The man kneeling on the ground opened his mouth in response to the voice that drifted in from somewhere.

"Right? That's what I thought. Sure, they say a die doesn't change, but what if I forced just one to change? What happens then?"

"It would change. Things would be different."

There is nothing the will cannot achieve. A perfect answer.

But was that a good thing?

The man muttered into empty air, yet answers kept coming back to him.

Even though all that stood before him was a black wall.

"So I let Knight Aoara die?"

"That's about right."

At some point the black wall was gone.

In its place stood a man with lips pressed tight, the same black hair, the same blue eyes.

Identical. Two identical faces.

The two did not look at each other.

Each simply said what he had to say.

"Then was my choice wrong?"

The kneeling Enkrid's pupils lurched. His hands shook worse than before.

"Did you think it was right?"

The Enkrid standing with an expressionless face asked back.

Tears of blood ran from the kneeling Enkrid's eyes. What began as drops became a torrent.

"Please, again, let me live this day again."

He wept blood and screamed his wish with everything he had.

"You know that's not possible."

The answer came back flat.

Even as the blood rose to ankle height, the standing figure did not flinch.

"So next time, make a better choice."

The expressionless Enkrid's words flew like a dagger and pierced the kneeling one through the heart.

A real blade materialized and slid between the ribs.

Blood poured from the kneeling Enkrid's chest in a waterfall.

It pooled and gathered and turned black.

The blackened blood swelled into a river.

A small ferry appeared on that river of blood, when it had arrived, there was no saying. A purple lamp lit the air around it, and the Boatman stood in his black robe, oar in hand.

The real Enkrid, who had been watching everything from one side, spoke.

"What are you doing?"

The blood vanished at once. Both false Enkrids vanished with it.

The Boatman ended his one-man show.

"I was in a good mood. Was it impressive?"

Not particularly. It left him neither troubled nor reflective.

Enkrid was the same as ever.

A failed tomorrow beats a perfect today. Standing still is the same as going backwards. Better to lose an arm and a leg and keep moving than to stop.

Of course, there might someday be something he could not surrender under any circumstances.

Thinking you could always find the best path at every crossroads was arrogance.

You simply did your best with what you were given in that moment.

Enkrid had decided to live that way, and that was why today could not hold him.

He was a traveler who moved forward without looking back.

He was a little curious, though, because this was the first time he had ever seen the Boatman in a good mood.

"Out of nowhere?"

What was there to be happy about, exactly.

"Do you know what it is?"

the Boatman asked.

It came without context, without preamble. What was he supposed to know?

"I don't."

Still, he answered plainly. This was a perfectly decent conversation compared to his old squad.

Thinking back to those people from his early squad days, yes, it was.

"You are currently adding strength to the curse I work."

Enkrid looked at the Boatman's face beneath the robe.

Skin cracked and gray, two colorless eyes.

The swaying lamp, the churning river, and on top of that the strange one-man show.

The branches of thought connected back to reality. Repeating today was a curse. What he was doing out there in the waking world, they had called it a Curse Ward.

A normal person's Curse Ward was a matter of taboo, but to be precise, what he was now was not a Curse Ward but a totem, someone had said.

A complicated story either way. But one thing was clear.

There were two curses. Curse and curse together.

Sometimes, without tracing the steps in between, a conclusion surfaced through instinct alone. This was one of those moments.

"You're drawing in the curse from the tent?"

That would be why the Boatman was in a good mood.

Instead of answering, the Boatman smiled. The corners of his mouth rose.

Whatever way you looked at it, it was not a pleasant smile. Unsettling was closer to it.

Inside the open mouth there were no teeth, only solid darkness.

Enkrid looked at it without much concern.

"Something like this happened before."

The Boatman chuckled and continued.

"Every curse in the area will converge on you. Do you know what that means? You can never leave this place. You are my plaything. A sacrifice to be trapped in this day. You will never escape the palm of my hand. Even in death, you will remain here. So your best option is to find a today worth enjoying."

The last words layered over each other and rang through his skull. It felt like someone knocking against his head.

Even so, Enkrid did not so much as furrow a brow.

He only thought.

So that's how it is.

It wasn't that he had some great power of his own. He had simply been caught in a severe curse, and that curse happened to pull other curses into itself.

It wasn't exactly a bother, but he had been curious why things like this kept happening.

Hadn't Audin mentioned back at Border Guard that there was someone working a strange curse?

The Boatman was probably talking about that person.

Conveniently, that person had apparently lived out their time and died a natural death right after touching him.

Until now, Enkrid had believed the assassin sent by the Cult had simply died of natural causes.

"Then I'll never be cursed for the rest of my life?"

At that, the Boatman's gaze swung around to the one who had spoken. The corners of his mouth, which had been raised, had quietly come back down.

The more he watched this one, the stranger it seemed.

"That's about right."

"I see."

"That is correct."

"Yes."

"……Go."

"Yes."

The dream ended.

He opened his eyes to the dark before dawn, not yet morning. His body felt unusually light. The Boatman had said he was drawing in curses, yet it seemed to have no effect on him at all.

So he drew in curses, but feeling it in his body was another matter.

Would that mean he could afford to be a little less careful when dealing with Sorcery?

"Damn, I'm exhausted."

Enkrid saw Rem step into the tent, muttering under his breath.

Rem came in with silent steps and spread out a bedroll about three paces away, then lay down.

"What are you doing?"

"Can't you tell? Sleeping."

Enkrid weighed whether to ask first why he was sleeping at this hour, or whether he had nowhere to sleep, and settled on the second.

"No place to go?"

"I have one."

"Then?"

"Arath won't take me back."

The relationship still hadn't mended. Should he really go cut off a head and bring it as a gift.

"Don't go adding some ridiculous idea on top of this. I'm already thinking about it."

Rem got there first.

"Tell me what you're thinking."

Enkrid said it, deciding it wasn't going to sort itself out on its own.

He was willing to help in return for the help he had received.

And he was confident that when it came to handling matters with a woman, he was better suited to it than this ignorant barbarian.

"Hmm."

Rem seemed to think for a moment. It looked like he was choosing his words.

Enkrid decided the right move was to say what he had already figured out, to get the other man to say what was actually on his mind.

"You can say it."

"……Say what?"

Rem blinked and asked. Enkrid spoke plainly.

"It's about the secret of your birth, isn't it? You can say it. What's the problem with that?"

He was out here feeding a curse-eating Boatman. A secret of birth was nothing next to that.

Western people generally had similar features, but Rem's looked a little different.

From that, Enkrid had concluded that Rem had some continental blood mixed in.

It was a guess, but he was fairly sure of it.

The look was different.

He had thought the same thing when he first met Arath.

That was the secret of his birth.

Wouldn't that be what made fitting in within the tribe difficult?

He didn't know whether it was from the mother's side or the father's, but mixed blood was his guess.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

Rem's eyes went wide with disbelief. They turned triangular. A note of irritation crept into his voice.

His instincts warned him. Wrong guess.

"I'm wrong?"

Enkrid asked again and offered a brief explanation, just to confirm.

Was it that continental blood was mixed in?

"I'm a pure-blooded Native Westerner. What are you on about?"

Enkrid looked carefully at the face of the child sleeping nearby.

The child's name was Jiba. She would likely grow up to be quite beautiful.

Ruagarne had vouched for it.

Western people as a whole did have attractive features.

Some had prominent cheekbones, some had freckles, but by any ordinary standard of beauty they were good-looking people, handsome and pretty.

According to old myths, they were descended from a bear that became human, and supposedly that bear had been very handsome.

There was also talk of elven blood mixing in, but that probably wasn't it.

Seeing them in person made it clear enough.

The otherworldly beauty that elves carried had a different quality to it.

These people overflowed with vitality. They were people who fought to survive, who herded cattle and sheep.

Enkrid looked at Rem, who had sat up with his torso raised from the thick cloth spread on the ground.

No matter how he looked at it, Rem was more ruggedly masculine than conventionally handsome.

Muscular forearms only added to that impression.

His gray hair was tied back in a rough knot. His eyes were sharp.

Eyes that would reach for an axe if things went sideways.

If you drew those eyes as a shape, wouldn't they be triangles? Rem had a talent for holding them in a constant inverted triangle.

"I'm wrong?"

Enkrid asked again.

There might be some ancestral connection that even Rem didn't know about.

"You picking a fight right now? I can't deal with this. I'm busy. I'm going to sleep and head out again."

"Really wrong?"

Enkrid trusted his own instincts. He had been sure of it. Even now he felt like he wasn't wrong, but really, there was no telling.

"Forget it, seriously. I'm sleeping. What do you think you know, going around saying it's fine? Did the curse break your brain?"

He had nothing to say to that.

He had simply guessed wrong.

Instinct couldn't be the answer to everything.

So he set his plan for the day: revisiting and training the Sensory Technique.

Nothing complicated.

He would loosen up and listen to things as he went.

Bird calls, sheep bleating, cattle lowing, the cry of a Velopter, the sound of grass bending under wind.

He stepped out of the tent and opened his ears first.

Starting with sound, he opened the Gate of the Sixth Sense. Without looking, he knew Ruagarne was following him out.

She settled quietly into her place behind him.

Dunbakel followed too.

She had nothing particular to do, so when told to join the training, she did.

While he twisted and loosened his body, Dunbakel stretched to his left and behind him, arms reaching wide. She pressed both palms to the ground and arched her back like a cat.

There was nowhere far to go, so they passed the time right there.

Training, and talking with whoever came to their senses in between.

"You came here with Rem?"

This person was one of them.

They had been training when, around midday, Rem left. Before evening, a man who had pushed through the curse and opened his eyes was there.

Enkrid went in after washing up and found the man awake, who then spoke to him.

His hair was half-white, streaks of white visible throughout, but the rest was as dark as Enkrid's own.

"I'm Geomnarae."

"Call me Enki. My name's too long, everyone says it's a mouthful."

They exchanged greetings and talked for a bit, and then the man said:

"That one's not the type to listen to what others tell him."

The relationship of captain and squad member must have sounded odd to him.

The man's gaze was openly observational.

Enkrid looked at him and answered.

"If he won't listen, this can do the talking instead."

He showed Aker as he said it.

It wasn't a lie. Even when he had to beat it into someone, he had always settled things with a sword.

And at this point he could have the conversation while doing the beating, too.

"You fight better than Rem?"

The man made a show of being further surprised.

"A little. Well enough to beat him nine times out of ten."

That hadn't been true before, but it was now.

To be precise, nine out of ten was pushing it a little, but sometimes you wanted to talk yourself up.

The "a little" and what came after didn't quite fit together, but the man let it slide.

He could see a playfulness peeking through.

Still, it wasn't nothing.

"Impressive. Even without Sorcery, a man who fights better than Rem."

"Does having Sorcery change things much?"

"It would be a completely different story. He would be more than worthy of the name hero. He is a man who stays of his own will in the Dusky Sky."

Why didn't Rem use his Sorcery?

There was no way to know.

"Hira told me. I thought it was over when I took hits from two Giants and a curse on top of that, so I should offer my thanks."

The man named Geomnarae had purple veins jutting out across his limbs, so prominent they looked like the veins themselves were coiled around him.

They called it the Violet Demon Lord's Curse, or something like that.

The name was blunt enough to be useful.

They said it was fashioned after the appearance of a Demon Lord with actual purple skin.

Even as the curse faded, in this state he would still be in pain.

Enkrid had seen him for two days now and knew enough to know that much.

Geomnarae blinked a few times, sleep still in his eyes. He started to sit up, then lay back down.

His body still wasn't listening to him.

"I can't get up, so accept my greeting in words."

This man was interesting too.

"Fair enough."

Enkrid let it pass without fuss.

Well. He just liked them, these people.

Especially since.

"Once I'm better, let's spar. I want to see what you can do."

One of them was even saying things he was glad to hear.

"What's the fastest way to recover?"

When he asked Hira:

"Shut your mouth and rest."

Geomnarae burst out laughing at that. Then he broke into a coughing fit.

His body was still fighting him.

Even so, he was someone who kept his laughter.

Next to wake was a woman around Hira's age. She took in the general situation and spoke right away.

"Thank you kindly. I'd give you my daughter if I could."

Geomnarae cut in at that.

"You don't have a daughter."

"That's why I said I'd give one."

They both laughed, the same kind of laugh. Enkrid laughed too.

Unlike elven humor, this was actually worth laughing at. Enkrid was quite fond of these people. They were good company.

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