WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 556: Strolling Through the City

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Why were the Madman Knights called madmen?

A peddler threw the question out, and his companion answered right away.

"Because there are actual madmen in it."

"Is it really fine to go around saying that?"

"Eh, it's all out there already."

Two peddlers were running their mouths at the edge of the market, one of the busier spots in the heart of Border Guard.

The one with thin lips and the looser tongue did most of the talking.

On the surface you might wonder if these two were half out of their minds, but what came out of their mouths was no great secret. It had already spread as far as it could spread.

Besides, the people they were talking about were nowhere in sight. Everyone knows that even kings get cursed behind their backs.

"Could I hear that story in more detail?"

A new voice cut in. The peddler who had been speaking tensed and hunched his shoulders before squinting at whoever had spoken.

There stood a white-haired blind old man who had appeared without the peddler noticing. His back was a little stooped, his face was deeply lined, and he leaned on a cane.

"What?"

The man had approached so quietly that the peddler flinched, but once he got a look at the old man, the tension drained from his shoulders and he answered.

"Well, listening in on other people's conversations is, ah, I suppose that's all right."

He had started to protest, but the old man pressed a silver coin into his hand, and the peddler switched gears immediately.

"It's all common talk anyway..."

He looked at the old man and opened his mouth.

Looking at a blind old man with no one to lean on, he felt a little bad about taking money from someone like that, so he stopped muttering and decided to explain everything he knew as thoroughly as he could.

He had taken payment, after all, so he owed the man his money's worth. That was how a real merchant operated.

So he did exactly that.

"Right then, listen up. There are five madmen in total."

One had lost both parents to a nobleman when he was young and had since swung an axe at the head of every noble he ever met.

"Word is he has a vicious temper, so if you run into him, keep your guard up. If you see gray hair, well, ah, never mind."

The peddler caught himself and changed course. That was not something to say to a blind old man. The man could not see a thing.

He talked until his mouth ran dry, sorting rumor from fact as he went.

He was even more eager than before, trying to make up for his slip.

A half-Beastfolk bear who tears people in two. A madman who tells you to beg forgiveness from God before he tears you apart.

The youngest member of the order, a swordsman and knight said to drink blood three times a week.

And last, a twisted killer who snapped after being abandoned by a woman and now finds his greatest joy in stabbing people in the back.

"But rumors are just rumors. From what the people who actually live in the city say, it's all a bit exaggerated."

The real story was that they were a little rough around the edges, but not the type who killed for sport.

"Rumors are one thing, but bad-mouthing them inside Border Guard tends not to end well, so I'd keep it to yourself."

The peddler figured he had given the man his silver coin's worth.

It was the kind of thing you could pick up from a short walk around the city, but getting it laid out this clearly was something else.

The old man did not look like a beggar, but he did not look wealthy either, and being blind on top of that, gathering information on his own could not have been easy.

"No, you've got part of it wrong."

Just as they were about to part ways, a rough-looking man walked over.

The peddler threw both hands up without thinking. The man looked half a second from throwing a punch.

Whether the peddler's hands went up or not made no difference to him. He said what he came to say.

"The axe madman is just plain crazy."

There was weight behind his words, the kind of conviction that only comes from lived experience, and something rawer underneath, something that had worked its way deep into the bone.

That was what made every word feel like it carried meaning.

The old man turned his white-cataract eyes toward the man who had stepped forward. His gaze landed roughly in the right direction, even without sight.

The man placed both hands on the peddler's shoulders. The peddler startled but did not shake them off.

Heat radiated from the man's hands and seeped into the peddler's shoulders. Even through the thick layers of his coat, the hands felt warm.

"Keep that in mind. That one is the real thing."

The man was one of the infantry soldiers Rem had recruited. Under ordinary circumstances he would never be allowed outside the barracks, but Rem gave people leave when he chose to.

He had granted them a half-day out.

It was a short reward, and only for those who had shown something in training.

And naturally, the thought of running did not even cross their minds.

"Try it. Run. I'll come after you. Whoever gets caught does double."

Double what? Training, most likely.

Or a beating, if not that.

Rem said it without a trace of a smile, and the man, one of the so-called axe soldiers, understood in that moment. He had walked right into it.

Well, that was life.

Nothing left to do but make the most of the short leave and trudge back feeling like a man headed to the gallows.

Then he heard someone defending that crazy bastard, and he could not just let it go. He could not stand there and listen to that.

"Hff."

He pulled his hands back and turned away with a sigh.

"God-forsaken lunatic."

He said it, turned, and walked off. There was no energy in his step. He was already facing away when the peddler nodded, without quite meaning to.

"So not everyone is fond of them?"

the old man asked slowly.

"Ah, well, that was probably a soldier. They say everyone's like that early in training."

The peddler had heard something similar from a guard whose face he knew, so he passed that along too.

The old man nodded a couple of times at that, then turned his head in another direction, and right at that moment, he seemed to make eye contact with someone passing by in a hood.

White cataracts and blue eyes appeared to scan each other across the empty air.

But the old man was blind. The hooded man found that puzzling and grew curious enough to ask.

"Can you see?"

"I cannot."

"I see."

Nothing more than a few words, barely a conversation. The old man nodded again a couple of times, and it looked like a habit.

"Well, we're busy."

The peddler left, and the old man started walking again, tapping his cane along the ground.

He swept the tip of the cane across the pavement as he went. Border Guard was the most bustling city in the region, and naturally the streets were packed, yet he moved through the crowd with remarkable ease.

The hooded man, Enkrid, watched the old man pass for a moment.

Look at him go.

Not many people recognized him, but when someone did, it always turned into a headache. So whenever he came into the city he wore a cloak and hood, and since plenty of others were dressed the same way, nobody looked twice.

Still, the blind old man who had just passed him had felt for all the world like they had looked each other in the eye.

A strange one.

And strangely faint in presence. His body looked like it had been trained, but a second glance made that seem uncertain. An ambiguous old man.

Anyway, he had come out here with a purpose. Enkrid started to move again.

He just needed the oddly eye-catching old man to drift out of sight, and then he would.

Cutting through the main thoroughfare seemed worse than taking a slight detour down a quieter road.

He had tried to cut straight through the center of the city, but why was it this crowded?

"Now, take a good look at this leather! Do you know what this is? I'll tell you, the hide of a crocodile Magic Beast! What's a crocodile, you ask? Have I been talking to someone who doesn't know what a crocodile is? Come on."

"This stone is nothing less than a lucky stone! It comes from the west, and dozens of Sorcerers poured their prayers into making it..."

"Firewood! Get your firewood!"

Voices were going hoarse all over the place.

Stalls and makeshift canopies filled every gap between buildings, and people hawking their goods added to the din. This stretch of road was too narrow for carts.

On top of that, a construction guild was moving building materials in on mules and handcarts to put up a new structure, and the whole thing was more of a battleground than any actual battlefield.

Not that blood was flying or people were dying.

Well, it was not completely free of that.

"You little, I told you this was my spot."

"What spots? There are no spots here!"

Two grown men were throwing punches at each other. Neither of them knew what they were doing. It looked like a vendor dispute that had spilled over into a brawl.

A young man watching from behind decided to get involved for no good reason, and things were about to turn into a genuine free-for-all.

The awkward part was that the old man with the cane was walking straight into the middle of it.

Enkrid had been watching the whole time, so he could not pretend he had not seen.

He pushed through the crowd in a few quick strides, threading between people with a push here and a pull there, and caught the old man's sleeve.

"You would do well not to go that way."

If you could not see, your hearing sharpened to make up for it, but the market was so loud that sorting out direction from sound alone must have been difficult.

"You are a good person," the old man said, without turning his head.

He seemed to know who had spoken and whose hand had taken his sleeve.

Enkrid found that genuinely puzzling. And that was all. The old man changed direction and walked on, and the moment the commotion peaked a guard came running.

Bwee!

The guard blew a whistle and shouted.

"Break it up! Right now! Hey, you, put that rock down! Someone dies and you die with them. Keep it up if you want to get hauled in front of a magistrate."

The guards moved in and broke it up efficiently.

Three trained, armed soldiers. No room for a clumsy brawler to do anything.

Once the fight was over, all that remained was the anger.

"Drifters from some other city."

"Oh right, so you're a native of Border Guard, are you?"

The two merchants were still fuming, and the young men behind them were not much better.

Enkrid thought back to something Krais had mentioned a few days ago.

About the kinds of problems that come up whenever people gather in one place.

Factional disputes.

One side was made up of people who had settled in Border Guard long ago. The other was made up of recent arrivals, and the two did not get along. There were also groups of people from the capital who had banded together, and some minor nobles from the southern part of Naurillia had moved into the city and formed their own cluster.

The infighting between these factions was becoming a headache.

It was a natural outcome of too many people packed into a small piece of land, all of them scraping hard to turn a profit.

And within that, there were those who paid the factions no mind, those who watched from a step back, and those who used the factions for their own ends.

'Not quite scheme-level, but someone like Vanessa would be perfectly positioned.'

Vanessa, a longtime local, had expanded her inn and opened a separate restaurant, and recently she had opened the Cafeteria as well.

The blended pumpkin drink they sold there was supposed to be excellent, but Enkrid had not tried it yet.

The line was just too long.

And it was not as though he could announce himself as the captain of Border Guard's Madman Knights to skip it.

There were probably ways around that if he wanted, but Enkrid had never been one to chase after food. He liked good things when he had them but did not go out of his way for them.

Anyway, when people gathered, problems followed. What he had just seen looked like one of those.

'Will it fester if left alone?'

Hard to say. He had never seen a city this lively before.

Border Guard had grown at a blistering pace in a short span of time, pulling far ahead of the surrounding towns.

Bakers from Martai had moved over, and people from Cross Guard, a city in Azpen, were crossing over to Border Guard as well.

With the city developing like this, any lord squeezing nearby territory-folk dry had no foothold here. So what were they going to do? Some of the neighboring nobles had naturally wanted to come under Enkrid's command, but since he would not take them, they had made up their minds to become direct holdings of the crown.

In other words, the royal family was gaining power.

Either way, the gates of Border Guard were always open, and no one who wanted to come in was turned away.

From what Krais had said, they still had not filled the workforce needed out in Greenfield.

Enkrid turned the half-heard conversation over in his mind once, watched the guards handling the peace for a moment, then headed for a quieter road.

The scene he had just witnessed was not exactly pleasant, but there was no reason to let it sour his mood.

He left the main district behind and passed through a few side streets.

Once there had been the smell of filth in these alleys, but a recent round of city improvements had made them wide and clean.

Here and there he spotted people who looked like members of the Gielpin Guild.

"How far do we carry it?" someone asked.

A man with three knife scars across his face, which gave him a rugged sort of good looks, was hauling a crate of fruit.

His looks and his clothes, combined with the short blade at his hip, confirmed it was the Gielpin Guild.

The dagger's grip had a black square emblem carved into it.

Recently the guild had settled on a crest, and members now carried it on their person.

These were the ones who guarded the city at night, sharing the job of keeping order alongside Border Guard's standing army.

When Enkrid stepped into the alley, some of the more sharp-eyed guild members glanced at him briefly, but they only watched. Nobody bothered him.

He came out the other end onto an open road.

Enkrid walked along the stone-paved street and looked up once at a sky that was a clean, cutting blue.

Not a cloud in the sky. The kind of day where walking with your eyes on the sky felt natural.

The breeze was cool and the sun was warm. Enkrid walked at an unhurried pace, footsteps steady. Giving everything your best did not mean sprinting everywhere and gasping for breath.

In that sense, this was a road worth walking.

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