WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 555: Do Not Forgive My Sins

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In a polytheistic land, where belief in and worship of many gods was accepted, being branded a heretic meant being cast out by every god at once.

Put plainly, in a society built on faith, it meant you were not treated as a human being at all.

Get stamped as a heretic, and there was nowhere left to live.

In a world where city life was the backbone of society, where would a branded heretic even go?

Become a bandit, or else flee to some other corner of the world, somewhere like the Oasis Village in the west, or the eastern frontier. The journey could hardly be called easy. It was the kind of thing you wagered your life on.

One scholar who faced this reality squarely once argued that witch hunts and heretic purges, spreading like wildfire, were the very thing that birthed bandit gangs. He was then condemned as a heretic himself and burned alive, so the truth of it was probably something people already knew and chose to look away from.

Being branded a heretic, in the original sense, meant worshipping idols and holding beliefs opposed to the faith that formed the continent's backbone.

In other words, Cultists were those rejected by every god, enemies defined by religion itself. They were the only ones who truly deserved the name heretic in any real sense.

Everything else called heresy was, in truth, as flexible as hanging a nose ring on an ear or an earring on a nose. Anyone living in this land who was not a fanatic, or simply not particularly naive, knew that.

By rights, genuine heretics outside of Cultists should have been rare. But since when did the world run on what was right and honest?

There was a reason expressions like witch hunts existed.

How many people on the continent actually had the courage to kill someone truly called a witch?

Mages were many times more dangerous on their own ground. Saying you would kill a witch in her sanctuary, even if someone had the nerve for it, they would die trying, so the courageous ones never lasted long.

And why kill a witch who was simply sitting there, spending her whole life studying magic in her own sanctuary?

Of course, not every witch was like that. Among the Cultists, there were witches who still lived by taking the hearts of children, and yet the order never punished them.

Any excuse would do, after all.

Looking at the reality of what the order called witch hunts was enough to make you sick.

Such things did not happen as easily now as they once had. But they had not disappeared entirely, either.

The world was unjust, and that injustice was always harsher on the weak.

All of that injustice was also what had made Audin a heretic.

"Father, have you abandoned me?"

Audin had doubted it countless times, and had tried to abandon his faith.

Yet God had never once taken back the evidence of that love from Audin.

The blessing given by the God of War, the divine power, still sat firmly rooted inside him.

It had been that way when he was expelled from the order, and it remained so now. If he truly were a heretic, if God had truly forsaken him, the divine power should have been the first thing to vanish. That would have been the natural order of things.

But it was not so. The divine power remained unchanged.

And because of that, even the order had no way to erase a divine power that was plainly there, so all they could do was seal it with the Prohibition Seal.

That was all Audin's label as a heretic had ever amounted to.

"You are a heretic."

The order had judged him so.

Why?

Because of a truth he had once vaguely known and turned away from, one he now understood clearly but still had no wish to look at directly.

The heretic brand was handed down not based on God's teachings, but on the order's own interests and political footing.

He was one example of that.

A man born with talent who had failed to carry out an Inquisitor's duties and, in the end, stood against the order.

Speaking to Enkrid, Audin dropped his gaze to the hand holding the reins. He saw a vision of blood dripping from that hand, falling to the ground drop by drop.

It was a hand that carried wrongs stretching back from the past, a hand that had seized and imprisoned innocent people, beaten them, done what should never have been done.

"Do not forgive my sins."

Audin quietly recited the first line of the dawn prayer he said every day. It had not changed once since he left his post as Inquisitor.

At Audin's words, Enkrid, who had been riding with his head tilted slightly downward, lifted it.

Enkrid had ridden the whole way deep in thought, barely saying a word. The distant, unfocused look in his eyes caught the light, and holding that light he turned to the side. Their eyes met, Enkrid's and Audin's. Rem was watching Audin from beside him too.

His expression said: what on earth is this bear going on about.

Enkrid sat upright in the saddle with the reins in hand, though his trapezius muscles were loose and relaxed, giving him an unhurried look. A posture that easy on horseback meant he was a more than capable rider.

The horse moved at a light trot. The autumn wind carried a comfortable coolness, and the sun was a little more biting than pleasant. Yellowed grass filled the ground beneath the hooves.

What was this land called again?

He let the idle thought drift past and spoke.

"What you want is a good cursing-out? Then I'll give you one."

Outwardly it sounded utterly indifferent.

Here someone was sharing what might have been the secret of a lifetime, and this was his response.

"A cursing-out? I'll handle that. Go on then, you bear, what kind of abuse do you want?"

Rem jumped in from the side, glad to oblige. At least he had not called Audin "youngest," which was something to be grateful for.

Audin could not continue for a moment.

He had anticipated Enkrid's reaction even as he was speaking. They had spent enough time together for that.

He had expected something like: yeah, fine, so what? What do you want me to do about it? A reaction that said he knew the rumor and did not care.

But what came back was a little different.

A cursing-out? Why would that come up?

"Was it because you wanted to be cursed at?"

At Enkrid's follow-up, Audin realized a small truth.

It was a realization that arrived like lightning from a short exchange.

Did I want someone to curse me?

A captain would have been able to guess, more or less, both why the rumor had spread and why Audin was still staying at Border Guard.

So why had he confessed that he was a heretic?

Had he wanted someone to curse his sins and punish him?

God had not given him punishment. And so, by his own reckoning, he had not yet been punished. Audin, with his rigorous and unyielding faith, truly believed that.

That he had not yet received any punishment at all.

"Self-harm is not a good habit."

Enkrid said it with the same detached tone.

"What do you mean, self-harm? Let's just let him have it properly. He said he wants to be cursed out. Go on then, you bear who pokes his eyes getting stung stealing honey from a tree."

Rem had been working on fresh material for his insults lately, but this attempt was a disaster.

"That doesn't quite work."

"Pfft, yeah, I can see that myself."

The barbarian's nonsense never reached his ears, so Audin did not respond.

The captain was right. What he had been doing was self-harm.

The holy scripture said: do not mistreat the body the Lord Father gave you.

But did that teaching truly refer only to the body?

What about the mind? The soul? The heart?

Audin had never neglected his body for a single moment, but he had not treated his mind with the same care.

He had always whipped himself. Was that intentional penance? An act meant for spiritual growth?

No.

Audin had gone over and over the sins of the past, tearing and crushing and grinding and flogging his own heart and soul countless times, without ever asking why. He had simply done it.

If asked why, he would say he had to.

He could not be forgiven for the sins of the past, yet he had to make known to the Lord Father what he had done wrong, had to speak it aloud.

It was something like a silent cry, begging for punishment. Yes. That was what it had been.

"Ah."

Audin opened his mouth and let out a low sound. His deep voice spread through the air around him.

The Lord Father has given me guidance once more.

Self-harm stood opposite the teachings of the holy scripture. Was that not itself a step down the wrong path?

Then he must not do it.

"I will never release my divine power for as long as I live."

At least not for his own sake. Even when death came for him, Audin would hold to that.

He could not call it atonement. Audin did not dare hope for forgiveness.

Inside his body, sealed by the Prohibition Seal, the divine power stirred.

It tried to pour out light in response to the realization, but Audin stilled his heart and pressed it back down.

If the Prohibition Seal were ever removed, the divine power built up through all these realizations would surge out like an explosion, but that time would never come.

He reaffirmed it once more.

This power is not meant to be used for me.

The hoofbeats rolled on, and an eagle passed overhead.

Shreeee.

Enkrid thought the sound resembled the Whistle Dagger. Listening to the same cry, Rem said,

"If that was a confession, then I'm a westerner."

"Right, and I'm a man of the continent."

Enkrid took that up.

Audin smiled the way he always did. They both knew he had been driven out as a heretic, and both knew he was no genuine heretic. What they were saying with those blunt words was: stop talking nonsense. The fact that even those rough barbarian brothers said it told him the time he had spent with them was anything but short.

Shreeeak!

After the eagle's cry, the shriek of a Magic Beast followed.

The resonance was different. One was clear and carried a sense of awe; the other was unstable, close to a harsh and unpleasant discord.

In the distance, a few Harpies could be seen beating their wings. Not far, but not close either.

Near the capital or near Border Guard, Magic Beasts rarely ran loose, but in areas where the Safe Road had yet to take proper hold, Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts appeared more often than before.

When Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts were driven out and crowded together in one place, a Colony could take root. The ones being pushed out would band together and form a group.

Only a few Harpies, but leaving them alone could become a nuisance. And since a little effort would take care of them, there was no reason to look the other way.

"I'll go," Rem said.

Enkrid nodded.

For an ordinary traveler or a merchant group it would have been a serious threat, but not for Rem.

The westerner kicked his horse in the belly and charged out. Hoofbeats drummed the earth and dust rose and billowed in a cloud.

It had not rained for days and the air was dry, so the dust thickened and blurred the view ahead.

After watching the drifting particles for a moment, Audin opened his mouth.

"I was an Inquisitor."

If naming himself as the subject of that rumor had been self-harm, this was genuine confession.

"Yeah."

Enkrid's reaction was the same as before. Audin told him about his past. It was not a long story.

He compressed his life into a few plain, clear lines.

An orphan. The priest he had thought of as a father. The doubt that came from judging heretics. The life that followed when he turned his back on the order.

He left out why he had come to Border Guard and the various realizations he had gained along the way. What remained was a lean, spare account.

Enkrid thought Audin had no gift for storytelling.

"Uh."

No empathy, no particular response. Just: so that's how it was.

There was nothing for Enkrid to say, really.

What was the point of picking through the past? Should he tell him to live right going forward? Or never make that kind of mistake again? Who was he to say any of that?

Audin, as an Inquisitor, had delivered several people to the order's prison.

As he laid that out, he thought to himself.

Were they truly sinners?

Now, he did not think so.

Then what had he taken them away for?

Telling it like this, he felt as though his thoughts were beginning to settle.

It was a strange thing. Enkrid did not empathize, but he listened properly, with full attention, straight and steady, without any gaps.

Watching that, speaking into it, Audin felt a little better.

"I don't think the order rotting is your fault."

Enkrid stated the fact plainly, without empathy or comfort, but Audin could not agree out loud.

Whether the order was corrupt or not, his own sins did not disappear.

This was similar to how Enkrid approached life.

Everyone said it was impossible, but he had said he would become a knight, so he simply lived toward that. Audin's heart said what it said, and so he followed it.

Everyone saw things differently and held different values.

Enkrid had no intention of correcting how someone else thought, or blaming them for it.

If he imposed his own way on someone else, would it be the right way for that person too?

He could not know. So it was not something to impose.

Everyone lived by their own Will, after all.

Not that Audin was the sort of person who was easily swayed, who would flip completely at a few words from someone else. He had no lack of conviction.

Someone like that could never have reached this level of skill to begin with.

Conviction. Will. Resolve.

Without those things, breaking through walls and pressing forward would have been difficult.

Somehow, talking with Audin, Enkrid quietly resolved something he had been turning over since earlier, one part of his swordsmanship.

Steadiness.

Hold it firm, hold it sure.

Had catching a glimpse of talent made him a little hasty?

Watching the Boatman step in, had he perhaps grown too taken with his own ability?

Recently there had been many sticking points in the swordsmanship he had named Wave-Blocking Sword, the technique that layered in counter-rebound force, and because Enkrid had trained in so many different styles, he had been instinctively searching for some detour among them.

He had meant to resolve it before returning to Border Guard, but that was not the right approach.

Rushing was not always the right path.

The method itself is not wrong.

It was simply not the right method for who he was right now. Someone else might find a detour perfectly suited to them.

Each life goes in its own way.

Wave-Blocking Sword would go the way of Wave-Blocking Sword.

Thinking through technique was something he always did.

Returning under autumn sunlight, no rain fell the entire way, so there was no need to find a cave to rest in.

They stopped in Zaltenbuk along the way. At the tavern, Enkrid had a light spar with a mercenary who wanted to test his skill. Someone recognized Enkrid there too, and after that, merchants and nobles came calling at all hours.

"You won't take my head, will you?"

Among them were those who took one look at Rem and said something like this out of sheer fright.

Rem had worked hard at the banquet to improve his reputation, but the rumor had not shifted.

The madman who, having lost both parents to a noble when he was young, split nobles' heads with an axe at the sight of one.

"The hell, why would my parents have been killed by a noble? I'm a westerner. There's no such thing as nobles in the west."

Rem found it infuriating, but he did not beat the noble standing in front of him over the injustice.

There were no bandits, but when they spotted Demon Creatures or Magic Beasts gathering, they could not simply pass by, so whenever one appeared they made sure to stop and work the body out.

"I'll send you to the Lord!"

Enkrid watched Audin step forward to fight a few times and picked up parts of his body techniques from that as well.

Not a bad education. Real combat at your side, and an excellent teacher beside you.

Rem scolded him in the middle of it, but that was just ordinary life.

"Shouldn't a knight by now be able to hear something once and get it on the spot? Honestly."

In a duel, it would have been hard to call the outcome either way, but Rem had things to say and he said them.

He was not wrong, either.

After going through all of that, they returned to Border Guard, and Enkrid continued living the same days as always.

Days of training and sparring.

Just as Crang had said, it was time to eat well and live well, to build up strength.

And then Enkrid officially announced to Border Guard the founding of the knight order.

"Madman Knights, what kind of name is that."

Krais shook his head, but by then it was already the official name.

The news spread faster and farther across the continent than any of them expected.

The founding of a new knight order? Nobody could remember the last time they had heard of such a thing.

Along with that, rumors about the key forces that made up Border Guard spread as well.

They were rumors built on the efforts of Rem and Audin.

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