WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 499: While We Weren't Looking

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The rain was too thin to call autumn rain. Late summer was still the more honest description.

Then it simply stopped, midway through falling.

It had neither rained nor not rained. The ground had not even gotten wet yet. The sky was darkening again, though, so more rain seemed likely.

"Who goes there?"

Just the three of them crossing into the territory, and a group of soldiers blocked the way.

Krais had clearly not been slacking off.

The soldiers standing in their path had discipline written all over them.

There was the type of soldier who would wave you through for a couple of coins, and the type who kept himself sharp and carried real military bearing. These were plainly the latter.

The way they gripped their Short Spears said as much.

The forearm muscles showing beneath their short linen sleeves carried traces of Audin's handiwork too.

Shortswords at their hips alongside secondary gear, equipment fully stocked.

Enkrid clocked all of it with a single sweep of his eyes.

His perception and the speed of his thinking had definitely gotten sharper.

"Huh? Enki?"

One of them, a woman in lighter clothes, called out like she recognized him. Beads of sweat gathered at her hairline, and she held what looked like parchment in her hand.

Leona, head of the Rockfreed Trading Company.

"What are you doing here?"

She had somehow made Enkrid the one asking questions.

"Work," Leona answered with a smile.

It looked like she was building a new city.

Enkrid said they had come back and were on their way in. Leona nodded, and just then Rem pushed his face forward from behind Enkrid, wearing a grin full of anticipation.

"Well then, wonder how those blockheads of mine are doing."

When he was excited, words just spilled out of him. Leona wiped the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve and looked straight at Enkrid as she replied.

Rem had said "of mine," but he had no actual subordinates, so he probably meant his squadmates.

"I haven't been over to Border Guard in a while, so I'm not really up on the news."

That made sense. There was clearly a mountain of work to do here.

It looked like they were building out from Border Guard and expanding into a city, and that was no easy thing.

The whole time a place like this was being established, you had to drive back the surrounding Demon Creatures, haul in stone, and stack it.

When founding a frontier city, the usual first step was to put up a Palisade and mark out the territory, all while feeling out the surrounding Demon Creatures and pushing them back.

Why? Because if you tried to build a city and the creatures came swarming in like mad, there was no answer for it.

And if the land pooled water instead of draining it when the rain came down heavy, that was trouble too.

On top of that, you needed farmland nearby, or there would be nobody to actually live in the city and feed themselves.

"Trading city" sounded fine as a title, sure.

But how many cities on the continent could truly sustain themselves on trade alone?

The kingdom ran on a mix of feudalism and centralized rule, so there were crown territories, and the crown poured food and supplies into those territories. In practical terms, though, a city without self-sufficiency was meaningless.

So this city had probably been built with exactly that goal in mind.

The problem was that the surrounding land was not prime farmland, and nearby sat a forest where Centaurs had once made their home.

A forest could be a treasury of resources for some, but it was equally good habitat for Demon Creatures.

From the look of things, they had decided not to clear the entire forest but to do significant work on it regardless.

Alongside the piles of stone, whole stacks of logs had been heaped up on one side.

This was not the work of a day or two.

Enkrid looked around. The signs of deliberate, sustained effort were everywhere.

He was simply curious what Krais had in mind.

"This city's name is Lockfried."

Leona said it with a smile. That was why she was out here, sweating and directing things herself.

A trading city run directly by the trading company. That was the shape of it.

Behind her, Matthias gave a nod and acknowledged him.

"Back at last?"

He had not looked this way before, but there were a few more lines in his face now. Beside him stood a young swordsman Enkrid had never seen, staying close to Matthias's side. From the way he stuck near, he looked like a disciple.

The Rockfreed Trading Company had more fighters than you would expect.

Still not to the level of Border Guard, though.

Enkrid accepted that easily enough, but to outside eyes, Border Guard was a combat force with a staggering concentration of strength.

"Ah, the General."

The soldiers who recognized Enkrid through Leona gave him a military salute.

"Right, you're all working hard. Everyone keeping well?"

Rem smiled his easy smile and clapped the soldiers on the shoulders as he passed.

The soldiers stayed at attention and said nothing.

Someone had clearly given them a briefing beforehand. Something like: if you see a gray-haired bastard with an axe, just ignore him. A warning to endure whatever the gray-haired one did.

Enkrid sensed this instinctively but did not commit to certainty.

He had once assumed Rem was half-blooded from the continent and been wrong, so that lesson had stuck. Verification was always necessary.

That said, he was not careless in ordinary times either. And he had learned new things recently.

Everyone has blind spots.

It was a lesson he had been made to accept. In the desert, he had been thrown out to die and come back, or more precisely, he had lost his mind, repeated the same day over and over, and eventually crawled back. He could not forget what he had learned from that.

Anyone can let their guard slip.

So accept it, and even if a gap opens up and your defense breaks, move immediately anyway. The point was what came after the gap.

Anyone could fall. Not everyone got back up right away.

But was getting back up instantly always the answer?

Keep possibilities open, judge, and move.

Future Sight, the first Will-based technique a knight learned, needed that kind of judgment woven into it.

Enkrid had a habit of finding lessons in small things, and he had been doing it for a long time.

It was a good habit. An old one, though only now beginning to show its worth. Something close to a talent that had always been his.

The habit of insight and reflection was a personal disposition he had carried since long before.

Back when he first wandered the continent and a child stuck a blade in him and left him with a hole in his gut, he had gone through something like that same reflection.

Do I actually have any talent?

And he had learned the method for finding the answer then too.

You find out by getting out there and rolling through it.

He did the same now. He moved to confirm whether his read was accurate.

"Who told you to be careful?"

Rem clapped a soldier on the shoulder and moved on. Enkrid followed, leaning in to ask quietly.

One soldier shifted his eyes and answered.

"Instructor Sir Ropord."

The title "Sir" was attached to an instructor. Could be that they knew he was a Squire, or it could simply have been respect. The title did carry that weight.

"See you later."

Enkrid said it to the soldier, then gave a small wave to Leona as he moved on.

Leona stopped him with a sudden question. "Any interest in marrying me?"

Enkrid blinked and stopped. Leona held a perfectly blank expression and finished without so much as a flicker.

"Joke."

Had she been spending too much time with Sinar lately?

Enkrid let the thought pass and moved on through the construction site, heading toward Border Guard.

Walking a good while further, the walls finally came into view in the distance.

On horseback it would be nothing, but on foot it would take some time.

At his pace, Enkrid figured he would arrive before noon from a dawn start.

Maybe three hours, give or take.

For the distance between two cities, it was close.

Krais had his reasons for building a new city this nearby.

The rain started up again, drops tapping down, and he walked through it until he came up to the wall.

"General?"

Squad Leader Benzence. Or Company Commander by now?

He was up on the wall and called out when he spotted him. Quite a feat to recognize someone from that distance, but Benzence had always had sharp eyes.

Enkrid scanned the faces of the soldiers on guard duty at the wall. He spotted people he knew. Quite a few he did not know too.

The area in front of the wall was busy. People stood in line to pass through, and beside them others had pitched tents and were living there.

The occasional elf, a dwarf here and there. The numbers were considerable.

Under some of the tents, steam rose from something. People had fully settled in and were cooking their own food.

Even at a glance, they did not look like destitute people.

"Come on through."

Benzence was proper about it. Personally, Enkrid had saved his life. Officially, Enkrid was his highest-ranking superior.

As Enkrid walked in, heads turned all around.

Who is this person that he just walks straight through?

Nobody stopped him or started anything, though. Partly because Benzence had come down himself to escort him, and partly because one look at Rem and Frog coming behind gave people reason to hold their tongues.

The dark-haired man walking in front also had a face you rarely saw, and a presence that stood apart.

By now his Will spread naturally through the air around him. That was why.

Enkrid walked the familiar paths inside and saw that quite a lot had changed in just a few months.

For one thing, far more people were selling things.

Border Guard was already a strategic location with heavy merchant traffic, so some of this was expected. But beyond that, the garrison had grown.

The surrounding wall had expanded, and several new buildings had gone up, pushing their rooftops toward the sky.

"Didn't they rush this?"

Rem sounded a little surprised.

How long had it been, and the scale had already grown this much?

Anyone seeing it might call Krais a sorcerer.

Once you understood how, it was not that remarkable.

Krais had cut out all the unnecessary steps in construction and made direct contact with the stonemason and craftsman guilds.

When a noble started a project, the usual path was to hand it down to a subordinate, who then went to find the guild, with middlemen along the way each taking a cut. Naturally that made everything slow and drove the Krona spent through the roof.

"We settle the guilds inside the city."

Krais had told Graham, the lord responsible for Border Guard, as though informing him rather than asking, and then simply done it.

There was nobody to stop him and no reason to.

Add to that the reputation that came with Enkrid's name, and people gathered readily enough.

"Didn't that General of yours hold back Azpen and then swallow up Marka and the old Molsen territory all together?"

That was pretty much what every guild master asked about first.

Whether stonemason guild or craftsman guild, people came. First it had been fighters wanting to test themselves against Enkrid, then nobles eyeing his future, then merchants after trade routes, and now skilled tradespeople were coming together.

Krais had gathered those tradespeople and put them to work.

That was not all he had done, though.

"The person in charge takes full responsibility for their section. I'll give you the right to pick five people. Use those five however you like, and I'll pay half upfront."

He picked one capable person, told that person to pick five more capable people, and let the work run from there, then set up an inspection team on top of that.

Not for the purpose of rooting out other people's mistakes.

These were the ones who went in to sort things out when something went wrong.

He organized the inspection team like a joint guild made up of each guild master, which turned things that should have been impossible into things that got done.

"Why is this not getting done?"

"We need hide glue, but the hunter guild is selling hides at high prices so the work is stuck."

"That's fair market value. Do you think Magic Beast hides are easy to come by?"

When problems like this came up, Krais moved the military in right away.

He would launch an off-schedule Magic Beast hunt, then rather than dumping the hides at low prices, he dealt them through the hunter guild.

By steadying prices that way and hammering through problems as they arose, everything naturally moved faster.

That was why a new garrison now stood before Enkrid.

Rem made one comment about the new garrison and walked straight in.

A wide drill ground opened up ahead.

At least twenty soldiers were sweating on it, probably more.

Rain coming down, and every one of them had their shirts off and was deep in training.

From where Enkrid, Rem, and Ruagarne stood, it looked like training.

To the people actually doing it, it probably felt more like punishment.

Shirts off, rolling and crawling and running all over the place. What kind of training was that supposed to be?

Most of the soldiers on the drill ground were thinking something very similar.

"Boss!"

At the far end of the ground, on a raised platform, under the only roof keeping the rain off, Ropord shouted.

He called to Enkrid with a welcome in his voice.

Enkrid raised a hand. Rem stepped ahead first.

"Where's the directionally-impaired bastard?"

Rem was already in combat mode.

His right hand had moved to his hip and was already wrapped around the axe handle.

He looked ready to throw the axe the moment Ragna came into sight.

They had sparred multiple times on the way here.

Enkrid still could not say who would win if Rem and Ragna actually fought.

Rem carrying Sorcery was definitely at a knight's level. He had shown something close to Pressure through his Sorcery.

Fear infusion, or something like that.

At Rem's question, full of anticipation, Ropord laughed. It was a slightly awkward laugh.

"Something wrong?"

Enkrid asked. The soldiers kept rolling without stopping, even with the group suddenly appearing.

Their training discipline was something else.

There had probably been some repeated displays of force to instill that.

"Well."

Ropord scratched the back of his head.

"He went out for a walk four days ago and hasn't been seen since."

Oh.

"Is he out of his mind?"

Rem made no effort to hide his disbelief.

How does someone who cannot find their way anywhere go out for a walk?

"Where to?"

Enkrid asked, calm.

"He said he was going to look around the inner mountain range for a bit."

"Why did you let him go alone?"

"He said he'd kill anyone who followed."

He would have dug in his heels. Easy to picture without seeing it.

Would Ragna die just from getting lost? Not a chance.

But had he actually gone into the mountain range?

If he had set out from the garrison, he might have crossed into eastern territory by now.

No, four days was too short for that.

Enkrid set the worry aside.

Not the type to die alone in some foreign place.

"What about the wildcat?"

"A problem came up in another city, so she left for a while."

"God, seriously."

Rem showed his displeasure.

Two more were absent on top of that.

That was probably why Ropord was the one standing here.

"Krais is in the city of Greenfield."

He added that the Greenfield outpost had been fully converted into a fortress city, and that fortress city had been named Greenfield.

"Sir Audin and Sir Teresa went to the mountain range for a fasting prayer."

Enkrid was not caught off guard.

These were all people who could go in any direction at any moment.

Well, they would find their own way back.

He thought that and let it go.

What actually caught his eye was how different Squire Ropord looked.

His bearing was not what it had been the last time Enkrid had seen him. He seemed to have grown considerably in strength.

Which was why Enkrid's gaze naturally settled on him.

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