WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 493: He'll Find His Own Way Back

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Why go this far?

Enkrid could not understand it, not even for a moment.

Was there any reason to hate him this much?

He had seen the hatred in those eyes. He just could not make sense of it. Being filled to the brim with loathing and resentment was one thing, but why direct it at him?

Enkrid had no way of knowing, of course. The Fortune-Teller Tribe's prodigy shaman had called the Apostle Enkrid killed his father.

In the Western lands, there was a saying: you cannot share a sky with the man who killed your father. The prodigy shaman had simply done what he had been taught since childhood.

Or maybe, with everything ruined around him, he had simply needed someone to blame. Thinking about it even for a moment, it was nothing but foolishness.

He had betrayed the entire Western lands, so why was he following their teachings?

Looked at another way, though, the behavior made a kind of sense.

The young shaman of the Fortune-Teller Tribe had been brainwashed and cornered. He had two choices left.

Get captured and die.

Or do something completely insane.

He chose the insane thing.

He had wagered everything on it. Sold his soul to a demon, cursed his own flesh.

It did not matter if his soul fell into hellfire and walked a road of eternal suffering.

By placing a curse on his own body first to ward off misfortune, he had gambled, and it had paid off after a fashion.

Along the way he had deceived one of the Elder Bear tribe's sorcerers, and luck had been with him there too. That sorcerer had pitied him, diseased and missing a leg. Pretending to be prey for cannibals had worked as well.

Heaven itself was aiding his cause, the shaman believed. Every circumstance had guided him toward this.

That was what the prodigy shaman had thought, and the wreckage of that mistaken choice was the result now before them.

Of course, Enkrid knew none of this.

So what? Did that change the present? It did not. He simply had to accept it.

"Hmm."

Enkrid let the sound out for no particular reason. A yellow world. The air looked like it would crunch if touched. The heat was brutal enough on its own, but there was nothing around him to use as a landmark.

So what now?

The lucky part was that Enkrid was not Ragna.

He could just wait until nightfall.

Reading the constellations to judge direction and find his way was not something he was especially practiced at, but it was something he could do.

On top of that, having traveled Grime's Path, he had a rough sense of where the desert lay.

Moving southeast should do it.

Good enough.

Enkrid turned his head slowly left and right, then let his gaze travel far into the distance.

The River of Sand Without Return. A lake of sand. A sea of sand. Sand, sand, nothing but sand.

He tried to find somewhere to escape the heat and gave up.

The desert was a miserable place. Nothing here at all.

Hadn't someone said there were cacti out here, Demon Creatures, animals that lived only in deserts?

There was nothing.

At least, that was what Enkrid's senses were telling him right now.

No choice but to endure the blazing sun, rays hot enough to cook flesh.

The one mercy was that his armor neutralized the heat to some degree, thanks to the Demon Creature hide. Bearable, just barely.

Enkrid did not know the desert well, but he knew all too well that moving carelessly in an unfamiliar environment was dangerous. He walked a short distance to check his surroundings, then stopped and held still. Holding still was one of his strengths.

Was I careless?

He decided to use the time to go over what he had recently learned.

Night was still a good while away.

The sun was brutal. He could not afford to burn through his stamina the way he normally did with physical training.

Enkrid sat down, slowed his breathing, and drew it deep. He waited for nightfall and settled into meditation.

* * *

Geomnarae stood before a split-skulled corpse. Ruagarne and Dunbakel were there too.

Geomnarae's brow creased hard.

"Spatial displacement. Forbidden sorcery."

Sorcery works through a medium.

That could be a totem, or sometimes an amulet. At times, a lifespan is offered up as payment.

Geomnarae had been prepared to fight the same way if Enkrid and Rem had not been there. To burn his own lifespan as the medium.

He had been ready to burn the flame of his life and face the enemy with a warrior's might, if only for a moment.

Because he had made similar preparations, he could recognize what had been done. This one had not merely burned a lifespan, they had burned everything.

Crazy bastard.

He had a rough sense of what had happened. It was guesswork, but the kind that felt closest to true.

The Fortune-Teller Tribe had someone with talent equal to Rem's.

That person had sacrificed their own soul to cast the sorcery. Meaning they had not used a totem as the medium, they had offered up their own lifespan and soul.

The state of the corpse said as much.

Talent, soul, sacrifice, offering. They had done all of that. Without it, this could never have happened.

They placed a curse on themselves first to ward off misfortune too.

They had taken the bad luck up front so the gamble would succeed. Even so, it should have failed. The backlash should have killed only them.

Yet somehow, Enkrid had been sent away.

Where? Unknown.

He had pieced together a rough picture of what happened. He could not know everything.

"If it was spatial displacement, where was he sent? Even the great mages said to have reached the pinnacle of magic cannot send another person away."

Frog said. Geomnarae figured that even if the split-skulled corpse came back to life and tried the same thing again, the attempt would not succeed a second time. The scales of fate had simply tipped a little further to the other side this time.

In continental terms, the goddess of fortune had taken the enemy's hand this round.

In the Western lands, they called this the scales tipping.

"The scales tipped the wrong way."

Geomnarae said.

"Speak precisely. Human."

Frog replied.

"And our benefactor?"

Jiba's mother had just stepped out, blinking. The shattered state of things was plain to see.

Word had spread to the entire tribe. Naturally. The honorary warrior who had saved them was gone.

Western folk burning to give everything they had gathered together. The Tribal Chief stood at the center and called out.

"All Western folk, hear me."

He did not even pause to swallow. His eyes shone. His voice carried weight.

"Find him. By any means."

And so they did. Starting from the smallest trace, they began combing through everything.

"Even if it takes years. We will find him without fail."

The Tribal Chief was not a man who made promises he could not keep. He meant every word. Without loyalty, you were no Western folk.

* * *

Rem sat alone in a world of black, lost in thought.

How many days had it been?

He did not know. But he knew one thing. The divine descent was complete. Throughout the process, all manner of memories had drifted through his mind.

When the sorcerers of the Western lands had seen Rem's talent as a child, every single one of them had said the same thing: dangerous.

"If your body cannot keep up, it will burst. So go slowly, one step at a time."

The one who was head sorcerer now had been head sorcerer then too.

Rem had followed the head sorcerer's advice halfway. On the surface, at least. Behind the scenes, he did as he liked.

Why? Because it was fun.

Sorcery was fun. Why would anyone try to stop him?

In the middle of all that, he learned the concepts of ancestral spirits, divine sorcery, and the rest, and that was when he first understood he was different from others.

"Using divine descent can leave you bedridden for a week."

Divine descent meant allowing a spirit to reside within the body.

The medium used was a pattern carved into the skin, or a totem.

Do that, and you became several times stronger than usual, your hands faster. Sharper eyes and ears, that went without saying.

In the Western lands, sorcery was divided into two broad types, and divine descent was one of them.

The other was divine manifestation.

Divine manifestation was causing a portion of a god to take up residence in the present world.

The concept of gods on the continent and the concept of gods in the Western lands were very different.

If continental gods meant absolute beings, in the Western lands they said that spirits dwelled in things that had been revered for a long time.

That was how wolves and bears and eagles came to be worshipped.

Rituals were performed, ceremonies held, and people would set out water alone, press their foreheads to the ground, and offer prayers as a show of reverence. All of it ordinary, so everyone did it.

Rem did not.

Spirits simply approached and took up residence without him doing anything. Receiving them into his body caused no real problems. More precisely, there were no side effects.

Then, wandering the continent and taking other sorceries into his body, he came to understand something.

Huh. This hurts. Side effects too.

So this is normal. Can I use this differently? It seemed like he could. A shift in thinking, experience, and instinct helped him figure it out.

Taking another's sorcery into your own body was a thoroughly insane thing to do, but Rem had managed it and built his own theory around it.

He had told Arath everything, and though she had been horrified at first, she soon understood.

He also understood why the head sorcerer and everyone else worried. Sorcery was a skill that drew on spirits for power. The being you called a spirit could just as easily be a demon.

The crooked path.

The wrong path. The mistaken path. There were many such examples.

Cases of being deceived by a cunning snake into giving rise to a wicked spirit.

The greater the vessel that handled sorcery, the more a powerful spirit could exert its strength in this world. That was why they worried.

But his mind was solid. Nothing shook it.

That won't happen to me.

So be at ease, he said.

To whom? To his axe.

An axe forged from meteorite iron. Even Rem could not do anything without a sorcery medium.

He had made his Inherited weapon long ago and used it as his sorcery medium.

That was why he had no need to carve patterns into his face.

Why punch holes in skin and push dye into them?

If they faded or took damage, they would stop doing their job.

Western folk with no talent for sorcery often skipped the patterns entirely, but those who used sorcery relied on tattoos more often than not.

Rem simply had no need, so he had not bothered.

In the darkness, the sorcery medium began to take shape.

The thing that had been sulking and refusing to listen was finally coming around.

A double-bladed axe with two heads. One blade was large, the other relatively small. The blade facing his own body was barely a handspan across, but the larger side was twice that.

A whetstone was still needed, but this axe served as its own sorcery medium, so it never broke or dulled. The whetstone was more like a treat it enjoyed receiving.

After sorting his thoughts and refining his state of mind, he opened his eyes. An old sorcerer was right in front of him.

"You startled me, you fool."

"Why startled?"

"It's only been six days."

He had stored all of his sorcery inside the Inherited weapon and left it there while he himself was away, and during that time the sorcery within the weapon had grown immense.

Enough that a half-baked sorcerer would pass out just from approaching it.

The head sorcerer had estimated it would take at least ten more days for the expanded sorcery to be absorbed back into the body, but not for Rem.

Since childhood, divine manifestation or divine descent, neither had put a load on his body.

And his body was considerably stronger now than it had been then. His skill in handling his body had grown, and his vessel had expanded.

His understanding of what a warrior was had been sorted out as well. The difference between a warrior and a knight, well, reabsorbing sorcery was easy.

A knight was someone who harmonized technique and Will.

A warrior was someone who harmonized technique and sorcery.

Simplified, that was the distinction.

Absorbing the sorcery had taken about five days, three of which were spent settling the Inherited weapon down.

Six days total, counting the first day, which had been spent preparing his body and mind.

If you attached the word ego to a weapon with its own will, an Inherited weapon fell into that category. It did not literally speak, but there were feelings held inside it.

The moment he gripped the weapon, he felt the same thing he had felt from Arath.

Hurt feelings.

Why did you leave me behind?

It was still young. Rem soothed it the way you would soothe a child. There were things he felt too, working through all of it.

A sense of omnipotence.

One more step and I feel like I could be right in front of that directionally-impaired bastard.

It felt like he could split a mountain with a single axe swing.

The sun? The wind? A lake? The earth? He could split anything.

Rem shook it off quickly. He already knew this from having taken in multiple spirits before.

Knowing the difference between what you could do and what you could not.

Rem already understood that difference well.

This was why he had been able to fight knight-class opponents even without sorcery. With serious intent, he could have killed them too.

The expanded vessel received the swollen sorcery with ease. He had been capable of carrying it all along, he had merely set it aside for a time.

Taking back what he had set aside, he felt omnipotent. But so what? That was all.

When the head sorcerer saw Rem rise with axe in hand, there were new lines carved into that old face, more than there had been before.

"You worked hard."

Sorcery was a power that required prayer and ritual. Even for himself, this was not something you casually walked into and walked back out carrying.

The head sorcerer would have been performing rituals for over thirty days for this.

Honoring the heavens and appeasing the earth, seeking permission from every spirit dwelling in nature. In Rem's place.

Right then. Time to head back.

It was time to watch the face of the man he called his captain go wide with shock.

"Let's go."

"I'm resting a few days before I head back."

Rem had no patience for waiting, so he left the head sorcerer behind and moved out first. The first piece of news waiting for him when he returned was this.

"Enki disappeared."

It was Ruagarne.

"Where did he go? Did he go off hunting Demon Creatures on his own?"

Rem asked.

"No."

"He's not the type to get lost."

He heard about the spatial displacement forbidden sorcery. He had no scabbard for the Inherited weapon, so he just carried it in his hand.

Everyone around him was quietly tense.

Rem had been the type to throw a fit when he was unhappy, even in the old days. But his reaction now was the same as always. The words he said, without any particular concern, were these.

"He'll find his way back."

He was not the type to die from getting a little lost. That was what he meant, that they should wait and it would be fine.

Arath and everyone else blinked. Not the reaction any of them had expected.

Rem had faith, though. Faith that this was not the kind of thing that would kill him.

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