WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 495: Watering the Fruit of Experience

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"Let us call forth Grime."

It was the fifteenth day since Enkrid had disappeared. The moment the words left Rem's mouth, he was ready to argue his case.

Grime was the name of a hero, but it was also the word for a sorcery called the Bird of Longing, a black bird born from yearning. An old tale held that after the hero died, he was reborn as a black bird to guard the western lands.

Either way, Rem had decided they needed to take a risk, so he opened his mouth.

What was longing? Thinking of something desperately, praying for it. Would that desperation produce a miracle? No. Sending out the Bird of Longing would not lead them straight to Enkrid, but it would tell them whether the target was alive and point them in a rough direction.

The problem was that using this sorcery burned through their food stores. Grime the hero and Grime the bird were both said to have enormous appetites. Food had to be offered as sacrifice.

Doing this now would mean an incredibly hard stretch ahead. But they would endure it somehow. A lean and difficult life was on the horizon regardless.

Still, what needed doing had to be done. They called Enkrid a hero who saved the western lands. A hero deserved to be treated as one. That was the western way.

Rem had prepared all sorts of arguments. But before he could lay any of them out, the Tribal Chief nodded without a moment's hesitation.

"Now, hear me out. This is..."

Rem started on instinct, then stopped.

Why was the chief nodding right away?

"Yes. Let us call it."

The words died in Rem's throat.

"Bring the sorcerers."

At the Tribal Chief's word, Arath moved. Juol, who had been sitting in the corner of the tent, followed her out. Geomnarae and Hira gave firm nods.

"The head sorcerer is bedridden, so I will stand at the center."

Hira stepped forward to lead the ritual herself. She set aside even her herb stick, and strong resolve lit in her eyes.

Rem's talent for sorcery was extraordinary, but only when it came to fighting. For a ritual like this, his sorcery was far too rough by nature. Put simply, it was like asking someone a favor while picking a fight with your tone, and that was something Rem could not control. So they needed another sorcerer, and Hira had volunteered.

She would be bedridden for at least two weeks after this ritual, and she did not hesitate for a second.

"If we call Grime now, what will you do afterward?"

Rem said it as though worrying on everyone else's behalf, even though he was the one who had raised the idea.

"We will deal with that when it comes. The sky god will provide."

The Tribal Chief answered. That same unbreakable faith showed in his eyes.

But should a Tribal Chief not be thinking of his entire tribe? The man who claimed descent from a sacred bear was going to put his whole tribe at risk over a foreigner?

Even by the standards of the honor-bound western folk, this felt like too much.

Rem had been planning to talk them into it himself. He felt strangely conflicted anyway.

Back during the great intertribal war, he had once tried to get them to call Grime and every single one of them had refused. Same when strange weather had swept across all the western lands. The Bird of Longing was something they had held back until the very last moment.

Had they found some revolutionary way to reduce the offering while he was gone?

No.

Light a great bonfire. Stack the offerings on top. Starting with the finest foods, precious provisions became sacrificial smoke and vanished.

They gathered the food. The sorcerers all knelt, and the ritual began.

"Nothing has changed," Rem said.

"What do you mean?" the Tribal Chief asked from beside him, his face composed, the look of someone doing what simply had to be done.

"I was asking whether it was really all right to call the Bird of Longing this freely."

The Tribal Chief watched smoke begin to curl up from inside the stacked firewood and bowed his head for a moment. He was putting his own longing into it.

He raised his head and looked at Rem.

"There is no other way, so we must do whatever we can."

Life for life. A common saying in the west.

Grace had to be repaid with grace.

The Tribal Chief did as he believed. So did every other westerner there.

It was what Rem himself had wanted, too. These were the same people who had turned him down with any excuse before, every time he brought it up. Seeing them now more eager than he was gave him a feeling he could not quite name.

That was how much of an impression Enkrid had left on them.

They did not just call him an honorary hero or a savior in words. The western folk put their whole tribe behind finding him.

Smoke billowed up. Flames leaped toward the sky. The soot rising with the flames spread across the sky, and instead of scattering, it began to clump together.

No one could go near the bonfire. Walk into the smoke and you died. People would suddenly seize, eyes rolling back, and collapse, and then they were gone.

For that reason, no one stepped inside.

Above the heads of the gathered tribe, the soot clumped and took shape. Fifty sorcerers called the Bird of Longing.

Gaaaaaaa.

Black smoke gathered into wings and formed a beak. It was a breathtaking sight. High above, dark soot fused into a bird and appeared in the sky.

It was like a cloud that had swallowed the sky, yet the shape was unmistakably a bird, beak and wings clear. The bird lingered in the sky for a time, then vanished. That was enough.

"He is alive!"

Hira cried out. That was all for the first day.

The Bird of Longing flew for three days in total, and the tribe burned through every scrap of food they had.

"That way!"

Hira pointed in a direction even as she collapsed.

Rem turned to follow her finger. It was not toward the River of Sand Without Return but somewhere a little east of it.

What chance did someone have of walking out of the heart of a desert alive?

Rem's mind ran through a few possibilities in an instant. He knew the desert himself. Not well enough to come and go freely, but he knew several ways to cross the River of Sand and a few back routes. Some of the small tribes built their lives around the desert.

But walking out of the desert's center was a different matter entirely.

For an ordinary person, eight out of ten, no, nine, would have to leave their fate to luck.

What if he were the one in that situation?

He already knew the answer. He would pick a direction and push straight through without looking back. Getting tired? Break through before you get tired.

So what had the captain done?

He would not have sat quietly and waited to die. He would have forgotten to rest and just kept walking. The slightest wrong turn and he would have gone deeper in, but if he had gotten out, Hira's finger was pointing the right way.

Is the goddess of fortune your ex-wife or something?

Luck would not just need to be on your side. It would have had to cling to you like a second skin for this to be possible.

From the direction she indicated, it seemed Enkrid had already cleared the desert's core.

Rem had been thinking that once the Bird of Longing gave them a direction, he might attempt the crossing himself.

"There goes one legend I was going to make my own," he said, the thought slipping out as words.

Arath frowned at him from beside. "What kind of nonsense is that?"

"Nothing. I should go meet him."

Rem started walking in the direction the Bird of Longing had pointed. Even if Enkrid had endured and clawed his way out, he would be withering away as they stood here.

More than a hundred westerners fell in behind Rem.

"Too many," Rem said flatly.

"We are worried too."

"As his future wife, I cannot be left behind."

"If he is in spiritual danger, I can help."

"I simply want to come along."

Jiba's mother, Jiba, a sorcerer whose name Rem did not know, a warrior who was decent enough in a fight.

Every single one of them did exactly as they pleased.

"Alluring," Ruagarne murmured from beside Rem.

Once, people had called Enkrid the Alluring Squad Leader. Everyone who fell under his spell did so because of him. There were plenty of spellbound people here too.

In a way, it made perfect sense. Not forgetting and honoring those who had fought for them was the western way. And the one who had saved them from danger and crisis was now in danger himself.

How could they just stand by and watch?

"I don't know either. Come along, then."

Rem said it and took the lead.

* * *

"It was isolation."

The Boatman spoke.

Enkrid blinked. He knew by instinct that it was a dream, but the setting was a little different. It felt like the Boatman had poured his desire to torment Enkrid right to the very end into it.

The surroundings were not black river water but sand. The River of Sand he had seen while dying. Every direction was sand, and a ferryboat rocked on top of it, sending up little wisps of grit.

Should he have been shaking with horror at the sight of sand?

Enkrid felt nothing in particular.

A purple lamp shone down on the sand, and the Boatman holding it spoke again.

"You walked quite well."

The Boatman is in a serious mood today.

Was it a self fragmented from living too long? Or just a uniquely odd personality?

Shhh.

Sand scattered. The ferry rocked.

Only then did Enkrid notice he was sitting in a stone chair with a backrest. The Boatman was sitting the same way, matching chairs, a stone table between them, facing each other.

Cracked gray skin and purple eyes stared straight at Enkrid.

He had said Enkrid walked well. Yes, he walked well. What else would he do, stumble?

"Even with nothing to protect."

"There was something."

Enkrid cut the Boatman off.

The purple eyes stared at him.

The Boatman's gaze felt deeper and heavier than before, but Enkrid did not look away. There had been times in the past when meeting the Boatman's eyes brought a kind of vertigo. Now he felt mostly unmoved.

Was this something you got used to?

Maybe.

"By not stopping, I protected myself."

That was the plain truth. He had not attached any particular reason to walking, but walking had brought that thought to him.

Isolation. Solitude. None of it actually mattered.

So what meaning did these steps have?

Wouldn't just holding on be more comfortable than this?

But then, why am I walking right now?

Why else.

To live uncomfortably rather than die comfortably.

That was the answer he had found. Not a grand reason. Just his ordinary way of thinking. Not some source of Will, nothing so dramatic.

If he had meant to give a loose answer, saying he just walked would have been enough. But every step he had taken to get out of that sand, every single one, had been an act of protecting himself.

Enkrid said it, and the Boatman was quiet for a moment before murmuring.

"…Even protecting oneself is a path."

To Enkrid, those words seemed to come from very far away.

The Boatman's voice faded, the sand turned back into black river water, and the ferry dissolved like smoke. Enkrid felt himself floating. Rising and rising, a light appeared above him.

Drops of water seeped through the light as they fell.

A pain like someone dragging a plow across his throat began.

Too bright to keep his eyes open. He shut them, then opened them, and woke.

"Are you awake?"

A face appeared before him, and Enkrid felt a burning pain in his throat. Still, there were things that needed saying.

"Still dreaming?"

His voice came out as rough as the pain in his throat.

Was this still part of the Boatman's trick? The way the Boatman had changed the surroundings to the River of Sand? He had thought he woke from the dream, but maybe not.

Reality had not yet settled into his skin.

"I was startled too, Captain."

The person spoke. A name surfaced in Enkrid's mind, one that belonged to a hunter who had once served under him.

Enri. Plains hunter. The friend who had left the unit saying he was going to settle down with the Florist Widow.

Some memories stayed too vivid to forget, and this was one of them.

"Why are you here?"

His speech came out clipped. Saying a handful of words was harder than swinging a sword for three days and nights straight.

The desert's scorching heat by day and the freezing cold at night had eaten away at his stamina without mercy, and the sweat he lost from it had brought on dehydration fast.

Even a knight, walking into the western desert without preparation, was asking to die. A true knight might find a way out regardless, but in Enri's understanding, the desert was a place where even knights could die.

And yet someone had come stumbling out of that desert half-dead, and it was Enkrid.

"Why I'm here would fill two books if I tried to explain it."

Enkrid nodded and passed out immediately.

Enri watched the captain go limp, fetched water, and tidied up around him.

This was a small village that had grown up around an oasis on the edge of the desert. Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts were rare here even by western standards, so the walls were not very high, the kind of place where criminals, hunters, and drifters gathered.

Enri was here for one reason. Krona.

After being turned down by the Florist Widow, he had spent some time working as a guard escort for a trading company. He was a decent shot with a bow, careful by nature, and reliable enough that he had built a good reputation in that line of work.

In the process, he had developed an eye for trade routes, and along the way he had heard stories about the western lands.

Get a few gems and set yourself up for life, the stories said.

Was that realistic? Stories always got more exaggerated the more they were passed around.

He had asked around and looked into it, and while fortune-making was an overstatement, it seemed like hunting rare gems and bringing back western specialty goods to sell could at least give him enough seed money for a business.

So he had taken every Krona he had saved and invested it in one Velopter before making the trip.

He had some confidence in himself. When others were sitting around waiting for luck, Enri had been studying the habits of animals.

And that was not all.

If things went even reasonably well, a new life might begin here. Building his own trading company had become his dream after the Florist Widow turned him away.

That was how he had been walking the edge of the desert when he found Enkrid.

It was a stretch where skeleton Demon Creatures appeared often, adventurers, explorers, and treasure hunters who had wandered into the desert without knowing what they were doing, died, and rose as those skeletons.

Enkrid had come stumbling out from among them.

At first Enri had thought it might be a Demon Creature.

The sunken eyes and parched, worn appearance made the figure look like a dried-up mummy. But those eyes were shining. Blue and clear.

"What in the world."

Enri was bewildered, but without hesitating, he abandoned the gem-eared fox he had been tracking and rescued Enkrid.

The moment he saw those eyes, he knew. The gear was different and the feel was different, but he recognized him instantly.

There were people and moments in life you could never forget, even if you only crossed paths with them once.

Why had he saved him? He had not even stopped to think about it. His body had moved first.

At some point, this man had saved his life too.

So there was no regret.

Enkrid opened his eyes again two days later.

Around that time, Rem and the westerners arrived at the small Oasis Village.

"Thought you were dead," Rem said.

Enkrid answered with a throat that had recovered somewhat.

"Almost."

In truth, he had died countless times over. But no one else knew that, so to them he looked like fortune itself had descended into a human body.

"Oh, Honorary Fortunate Hero."

That was the reason the Tribal Chief had given him that strange title.

Enkrid let it slide without much thought. He was still turning over what he had come to understand while walking alone, step after step.

He had been isolated. The Boatman had told him to walk in solitude. And through all of it, he had apparently kept training out of pure habit.

When he woke and his mind came back to him, that was what he found.

A realization had come alongside the Knight's Strike.

What path would he walk to become a knight?

He could see it now. More clearly than at any point before.

The desert wandering had done that. The act itself had been like watering the fruit of experience.

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