WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 503: You're That Good at Fighting? Follow Me to the Training Ground

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Nurat had been the lieutenant of the battalion commander stationed at Greenfield.

'What was that commander's name again?'

Enkrid thought for a moment but couldn't pull it up. What came to mind instead was that the man wrote poetry and had a fine singing voice.

Some things faded when you lived the same day over and over. Even the best memory wasn't perfect.

But Nurat had stuck. Dark skin, an easy spirit, elastic muscles. Krais's lover.

Those memories layered on top of each other and settled into something fixed.

It was something he was noticing fresh now, but Frog's eye for reading talent wasn't perfect. No matter how sharp the eye, it wasn't always right.

Even so, watching Nurat's posture and the way she moved, she clearly registered above a certain level.

Unless she had picked up Vallen's bluffing mercenary gait, Nurat had crossed some kind of wall.

"You've gotten better," Enkrid said plainly.

"Me? I've been training hard, but does it show? Am I in better shape?"

Krais flexed and showed off his bicep, but Enkrid didn't spare him a glance.

Nurat lifted her left foot and planted it so the whole sole pressed flat against the ground. More precisely, she was spreading her center of gravity across the entire foot so she could react in any direction at any moment.

A stance like that made it easy to burst left or right on instinct.

Rem let out a small sound of appreciation, and Ruagarne rolled her large eyes.

Even to Ruagarne, the talent was something else. Nurat had been born with a different kind of body from the start.

Elastic muscles, a frame that could rival any Beastfolk. And built on top of that, she had stacked effort and grueling training brick by brick until a peak broke through.

Enkrid stood up and dusted off his backside. No dust rose. The sky hung heavy with storm clouds, weather that couldn't decide between raining and stopping.

"Nurat is my partner, in case you didn't know," Krais said, noticing Enkrid staring at her.

Enkrid ignored the nonsense and spoke again.

"Not bad."

It could easily have been misread, but Nurat didn't take it that way. Krais had known exactly what he was saying too.

They hadn't seen each other in a while. It was the kind of joke you tossed out for that reason.

Nurat gave a brief dip of her head, a simple soldier's salute.

Rem and Ruagarne understood the situation well enough, not just the judgment that Nurat had gotten sharper, but what lay behind it.

In short, it came down to stimulus. Clearly the work of a monster who carried a talent for driving others to want more.

Enkrid didn't know it himself, but his presence made a fine irritant.

It wasn't just Nurat. The soldiers as a whole had risen. The reason was that Enkrid, in every stretch of time he had ever spent here, trained with complete sincerity.

There are people like that in the world. People who, just by the way they live, make you stop and ask whether you're actually living hard enough.

People whose existence stirs up some immediate hunger in you.

Enkrid had done that to everyone around him through his bearing, his actions, and the life he had led. It was a kindling of will.

'Come to think of it, I've been pushing pretty hard too.'

Rem thought that to himself. The training and conditioning unlike anything he'd done before, part of it was wanting to smack the heads of the idiots around him, sure, but looking back, watching Enkrid scratch and claw his way through each day had made Rem's own hands itch.

And it wouldn't be just him.

It was a rising spiral.

The reason orders of knights were founded in the first place was something like this, the idea of setting a knight before people as a landmark to push toward.

Though a knight, made of nothing but talent, could just as easily become a symbol of futility and despair.

Among them, there had probably never been one this obsessed with the blade.

"Anyway, glad you're back," Krais said with a grin.

"Let's eat," Enkrid said. He'd been moving for a while. It was past time to be hungry.

They wrapped up at the training ground on their own and drifted apart, then filed into the dining hall attached to the lodging.

A wide table, a private room, and hired staff carrying food in and out at a brisk pace.

A whole roasted pig, carved into slices and finished with a squeeze of lime, was brought out.

Rem and Jaxon tried to go at each other with their forks even while eating, so Enkrid sat between them.

Watching those two act feral was old news. Enkrid and Ruagarne took it in stride, and Sinar didn't care to begin with, but the escort unit Krais had brought along went stiff. They were seated at the next table over. Enkrid could see the tension in their shoulders and legs.

"Who are they?" he asked.

One of the escorts shot to his feet.

"Sir! I'm Ilanbeitzu, from the Ruabang region!"

Not a name you heard every day. His skin was on the fairer side, though the sun had darkened it some from traveling outdoors. Ilanbeitzu stood and looked at Enkrid, eyes bright.

"I have great respect for you, sir."

Half the escort unit was like that, people drawn in by Enkrid's reputation.

The other half seemed like the sort of mercenaries who just wanted to do their job, but all of them showed Enkrid courtesy.

"Where do you find that many of them?" Rem asked from beside him.

Krais swallowed a mouthful of roasted pork before answering.

"People kept picking fights, so it couldn't be helped."

"What kind of fights?"

Rem's head worked faster than his face let on. Thinking about the city's size and the king's backing, there shouldn't have been anyone with a reason to pick a fight with Krais.

The man had even brought the city's criminal guild under his thumb. Had that been taken from him?

"It's a petty story. A few of the surrounding nobles didn't like how heavily the king was favoring Border Guard territory."

Ruling meant governing. And governing meant soothing one person after another. Beating everyone who annoyed you into the ground was just how you became a tyrant.

As it was, Crang had put Count Molsen down during the civil war, and a portion of the nobility had fallen with him.

Some had risen as new nobles in the aftermath, and some who had fallen had climbed back up, but more had died than either.

The governance hadn't failed.

Crang kept up his internal discipline without rest, but idiots who couldn't get their heads straight kept appearing regardless.

If Rem understood it, Enkrid wasn't going to miss it. He got the general shape of things.

'One fool picking a fight.'

A fool who still had an eye for the city's core resources, targeting Krais proved that. Or maybe they had tried Graham first and couldn't get their teeth in. That was probably it.

Enkrid sorted out his thoughts and worked his jaw. He chewed the meat, and the juices burst across his tongue.

Krais had tried playing the noble factions against each other and dropping the king's name to build some competition, tried to keep eyes away from Border Guard, but it hadn't worked.

Krais was sharp, but sharp didn't mean perfect. Everyone made mistakes.

And lately, expanding the city on top of everything else had made staying out of sight close to impossible.

Not that Enkrid had picked up on Krais's misstep specifically.

He had only noticed one fool picking a fight. More exactly, he knew the man was a cousin of some great noble, and roughly where his city sat. That was enough.

The problem wasn't any mistake or limit on Krais's part. The one picking the fight was simply in the wrong.

"The city's grown," Enkrid said, opening the thread.

Krais picked it up right away.

"Grown? It's not just the size. The substance is different now. The substance."

Krais dipped a finger in his water cup, pulled it out, and drew a line across the tablecloth, one clean line, weaving between bits of food.

"The road connects here to here. This is Border Guard, this is roughly the capital, and below that runs down to Martai and the other cities."

A road stretching out from what he called Border Guard. While Enkrid had been away, Krais had made up his mind and built the city up.

At the same time, he had built up his own dream.

'Ending it at just one pleasure city would be a waste.'

If only one city had a salon, wealthy patrons from far away would struggle to reach it. There was a better way. Krais's sharp mind had found the path.

'Build large-scale salons in every city.'

Connect them by road, put checkpoints along the way, and plant a salon in every city once safety was guaranteed. Size the salon to fit the city, simple enough.

He had even roughed out a name.

'Krais's Happy Bathhouse?'

Running water piped in, so you could wash, eat, play, and sleep all under one roof.

"Once the safe road is in place, trading companies will come swarming like moths to flame. The main roads will charge a fee too. A toll road."

The idea was fresh enough that Enkrid found himself nodding.

Rem and Jaxon stepped outside somewhere in the middle to have a round. Ruagarne slipped away too, and so did Sinar. Before long, only Krais and Enkrid were left at the table.

"I won't be raising the walls high on the Azpen side," Krais said, continuing.

"Why?"

"Because starting to build walls facing Azpen is about the same as putting a blade to their throat."

Even a defensive move would be read as aggression by Azpen. More precisely, there was no point handing them a pretext.

The walls would stay at a moderate height while the border crept outward, quietly.

Beyond that, hearing the full run of what had happened while he was gone, Krais had clearly put in no small amount of work. And Krais himself didn't see any of it as work.

He had lined his pockets well in the middle of it all and found it enjoyable. Traveling with escorts was a nuisance, but the people picking fights in one city or another left him no choice, he added.

"Travel in numbers like this and most people won't bother starting something, so, yeah."

Anyone at a reasonable level would be handled by Nurat. But pointless fights wasted time, so he'd rather move with a crowd.

In the middle of all that bother and those headaches, he had also created a new unit type.

However you looked at it, Krais was a genius.

What he had built was cavalry, and he called them the cavalry reconnaissance unit.

Training cavalry was enormously difficult. Getting warhorses ready alone was a tremendous undertaking.

A horse that could charge across a battlefield wasn't just a horse that ran well.

Timid horses had to be carefully handled and raised through a long process.

Krais had managed the warhorses somehow, pulling in someone with a talent for raising horses and getting the breeding started, but the riders?

Riders had to handle their mounts like an extension of their own body.

Forming a proper cavalry unit in a short span of time was out of the question.

Not something a few months could solve.

So leave it? Krais didn't. He changed his approach.

He started by pulling every capable rider from across the entire force and gathering them together.

Then he ran them hard to build their combat capability. Some dropped out along the way, and cutting the ones who looked like they'd only ever be good for banditry left the numbers thin.

So rather than a traditional cavalry unit, they could only be used as an intercept force.

That was what Nurat now led, the Greenfield cavalry reconnaissance unit.

The name was a working title, Krais said. Hearing that, Enkrid thought of Enri, whom he had met in the west.

The hunter who had turned merchant. He would be bringing resources. The original plan was probably to use the safe road Border Guard had built and pass through on the way, but some of what he carried could be bought here.

'Wasn't there obsidian spears coming in from the west too?'

Not something you commonly found on the continent. An obsidian spearhead was effective as a throwing spear precisely because it was fragile, but for thrusting in close quarters, the durability was far too low.

But the cavalry unit Border Guard had built relied mainly on bows and throwing spears as its primary attack.

Whether that made them devastatingly powerful was another question, but facing them would be a headache.

A mounted force jabbing here and there, never sitting still.

'That would be annoying.'

For a cavalry reconnaissance unit, that alone was value enough.

"Let's call them the Black Spear Cavalry."

"Pardon?"

"The name."

"Hmm. Dye the spear shafts black, you mean?"

Krais guessed at the meaning and asked.

Names carried weight. Some names were fear just from hearing them, and some built morale before the fight even started.

The name the Gray Hounds of Azpen had earned, stubborn lovers, had been built the same way.

A name that whispered: once you are marked, they will hunt you down no matter what it takes.

Black Spear Cavalry didn't sound bad, Krais murmured, and Enkrid mentioned a few things he'd be getting from the west.

"That's good," Krais said.

Obsidian spearheads and spear-throwers. The beginning of a mounted unit that moved fast and struck hard.

Resources from the west, horses born on the Greenfield plains, Krais's head, and soldiers who had endured honest, grinding training.

All of it combined into one unit. Still, when it came down to it, this was just a cavalry reconnaissance unit.

"What about the rest of the reconnaissance team?"

"Finn leads it. She said she'd turn them all into rangers."

Soldier specialization.

It was the large-scale unit restructuring plan Enkrid had agreed to with Krais. Equipment had been unified for it, and the units divided into swordsmen, spearmen, archers, shield bearers, cavalry, and mounted archers.

While he had been away, it had all been moving along steadily.

After trading more stories like that, they left the dining hall, and with a loud snort, the wild horse with mismatched eyes came barreling toward Enkrid like it meant to knock him flat.

Enkrid caught the horse's head with his palm and deflected the force. It was Odd-Eye, and it was playing around.

The same as greeting a friend you hadn't seen in a while by shoving them.

"Yeah. Been a while," Enkrid said, welcoming back the friend with Magic Beast blood in its veins. He grabbed the mane and shook it, and Odd-Eye whinnied with what seemed like pure excitement, flapping its lips side to side.

The city was too small for Odd-Eye. It had felt suffocating, so the horse spent its days ranging outside. That day, it had run into someone being led by its friend and followed them back here.

Enkrid stroked the mane in greeting, then noticed a shadow falling across the sunlight.

A man stood behind him with a black sword slung over one shoulder. Blond hair, red eyes, a thin leather coat with blood spattered across it in dots.

He had gone out without armor, had he.

A rough-looking figure, but the sword skill behind that look was anything but rough.

"When did you get back?" the man asked, as casual as if he had seen Enkrid yesterday and this was just the next morning.

Enkrid let out a small laugh and answered.

"A while ago."

"Got back while I was out for a short walk."

He muttered it. The blood on his clothes suggested this hadn't been a stroll where he simply got turned around. He had done some cutting somewhere and come back.

It looked like he hadn't slept or eaten anything properly in days.

Well. As always, that didn't seem to matter much to him.

"Let's fight. You lousy northern blade who can't find his way down a straight road."

"...Why are you saying things you'd say to a savage to me?"

Ragna went stiff for a moment before answering.

Being goaded the same way Enkrid goaded Rem twisted his mood a little. He knew Enkrid was doing it deliberately, and still couldn't help it.

"You think you're that good? Follow me to the training ground."

Enkrid ignored his response and finished what he had to say.

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