A Knight who Eternally Regresses - Chapter 558

WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 558: The Festival and the Guest

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Thud-thump.

The organ that had been quietly pumping blood through his body suddenly announced its presence.

His heart beat. It thumped twice, declaring that it was here.

Truth be told, there was one thing Krais valued more than his dreams, more than his life, more than living itself.

It was something like preparation for the future, he supposed. A tangible, visible, holdable thing of real worth.

In other words, Krona.

To him, the future, the symbol of value, the dream, life itself, all of it circled back to Krona.

If he built a salon and raked in gold coins by the pile, what would he do with them?

He had no idea. He just wanted to live doing whatever he felt like.

Because even when he did not know what he wanted, having pockets stuffed with gold was enough.

That was how Krais pictured his future.

Right now, Enkrid was whispering that future and that dream into his ear.

"If it works out, you will make an incredible amount of Krona."

In that instant, Krais saw a mountain of gold coins appear before his eyes. A hallucination. He had not taken anything, and yet there it was.

"Building the pleasure city you talked about on the border between the Empire and the southern great power wouldn't be a bad idea either."

Krais's eyes went hazy. His mind had already traveled to some distant future.

He had heard recently that Ann had been developing a remedy, failed, and produced instead a drug that glowed in the dark.

They were using it to build glowing-water lighthouses to light up Border Guard at night, but if they kept pushing that further and developed it more?

A few alchemists had joined since Ann, people who at least did some research, so it was not impossible.

Build a great sphere at the center of the city and fill it with the glowing water.

Then raise it enormous at the city's center, making it the symbol of the salon city?

There was a construction guild skilled in exactly that kind of work, so it was entirely doable.

In his daydream, Krais climbed the high walls erected on the southern border.

"Here, look at that. That is the pleasure city."

He spread his hand and introduced it to dozens of nobles following behind him.

They all turned their gaze at his gesture, and even in the night, a glowing city came into view. A pleasure city in the truest sense of the word. A city that glowed from within.

Just imagining it sent a thrill crawling from the tips of his toes up to the roots of his hair.

'No, can't end it there. Got to keep it spinning.'

Build a mechanism and make it rotate left and right. Could it turn on its own? Was it possible to create a magic-powered drive?

"Here, look. That is the glowing city, Salon de Cite!"

The city did not merely glow. It scattered light, spreading it all around.

He had thrown the name out roughly, whatever came to his tongue first, but it rolled off nicely.

Krais did not realize it himself, but the moment he had decided to give up, his mind had stopped thinking deeply.

He had simply stopped using his head.

That was why every problem had felt impossible. The reason he saw them as walls he could not cross was that his motivation had gone missing, his heart had drifted elsewhere.

That same mind was now softening and spinning like a chunk of stale bread dissolving in hot soup.

Enkrid watched Krais's eyes suddenly change.

They went hazy, then found their light again.

'Why does he always do this.'

He had no idea. And since he did not particularly want to know, he just kept doing what he had been doing, cheering him on.

This had been what Krais wanted to do in the first place.

Krais had forgotten it for a while, but Enkrid had not.

A grand salon city, the Krona to be made from it, the mountain of gold he would stack up.

Krais had said the salon city was good and the gold was good. That was why Enkrid had said what he said.

And speaking of it now, Enkrid found himself curious about what his squad members, or what he could now call his knights, were actually after.

What each of them was here for.

He had a rough guess but had never asked. Until now there had been no need.

Things were a little different now, though. They had become a knight order, and he had brought them into it.

Did everyone have to blindly follow along just because he had something he wanted, Rem and all the rest?

They officially carried the name of a knight order, but he had never gone up to each of them and told them they were members, not in so many words.

Rem at least had said he would put his axe toward erasing the Cursed Ground, but what about the others?

It was a thought that came to him as he listened to Krais talk.

He would have to go and ask them one by one. He would also need to pin down the size and shape of the knight order properly.

All the knight-order matters had been handled by Krais until now, but while Krais had gone off on his little detour, this time Enkrid had thought of it first.

"Are you sick?"

The way his eyes were rolling around, he might have a fever. That was why Enkrid asked.

"No."

Krais's eyes, which had gone as flat and colorless as a dead fish, were bright again, so he was probably fine.

And perhaps because he had caught a glimpse of Enkrid lost in thought, Krais's mouth opened freely.

"You've been worried about sharing that rough border with Azpen, haven't you, even if it's more or less a working arrangement? And the factions forming inside the city, all the other headaches too."

Well, not that worried, actually.

In truth, the honest answer was that he had not paid much attention to it.

If a problem blew up he would deal with it, but for now, since he could not just cut everyone down or beat them all unconscious, was the answer not simply to let it sit?

Enkrid was sharp enough to recognize problems, but deep down his approach was this: when it festers, lance it then, and cut the abscess out.

The reality was that managing things that way was not suited to how large the territory had grown, and there were plenty of people feeling frustrated, even if not quite to the point of open resentment.

The city itself ran well. Food was plentiful and Krona came in steadily, and yet here they were.

It could not be helped. No matter how good things were, not everything could be good at once.

So what was to be done about a situation like this?

Until a moment ago, Krais had had no answer, but now he did.

"I have an idea."

Without him noticing, the only thing left spinning in Krais's head was that rotating mechanism.

It was pouring out gold coins in real time.

Give up? Risk? Were those not things you had to accept before you could see any results?

The commander standing right in front of him had done exactly that, had he not?

Krais set aside his wavering heart. Steadying it was not enough, so he decided to forget it entirely.

"We have a large food stockpile this year. I'll use that."

Beginning with the clearing of Greenfield, he had built out the safe road and expanded the farmland around it, and effort had gone into herding and hunting as well.

Ranger training even included a dedicated course for hunting Magic Beasts and wild game.

On top of that, Border Guard's role as a trading city had grown further.

Recently, the arrival of the Enri trading company from the west had opened the door to a western trade route as well.

The profit flowing from all of that was food.

Put that way, Border Guard sounded already wealthy, but the issue was that none of this was Krais's personal property.

He could not take it all and run, and he had no desire to.

Krais was the same as the rest of them, he had learned from watching Enkrid what it meant to move straight and true.

He would press forward and build a glowing city.

Krais had made up his mind.

"Yeah, alright."

"Right, then."

Krais turned and left.

"What was that about? Why'd he come?"

Rem had come out of the washroom and shook the water from his hair with a dry cloth.

"No idea."

Enkrid answered honestly.

"Said he was busy, didn't he?"

"Apparently."

Enkrid filed it away as just one of those things that happened, and the next morning word reached him that Krais had managed to persuade Abnaier, the strategist he had brought in half as a prisoner.

When he asked about it later, Krais said this.

"I'm going to put him to work."

Asked how he could trust someone like that, Krais replied:

"I don't. Honestly, I don't trust any of them. Instead, I make sure each person never knows what the others are doing."

He also said he was limiting what Abnaier did to matters involving Azpen.

"There's more than enough to keep him occupied with just trade and stabilizing relations, military funding and army business stripped out entirely."

That was what Krais said. And true to his word, Abnaier threw himself completely into the work.

Enkrid stopped by at some point, even though he had been the one to bring Abnaier and had never once checked on him, and found Abnaier with his face buried in his desk, head never lifting.

He was not asleep. He was buried in documents.

"Who is it? Set whatever you brought on the pile down there."

Enkrid decided he had come for nothing, shut the door without a word, and left.

At any rate, with Abnaier handling trade with Azpen and other miscellaneous matters, Krais could breathe a little easier, and with the time freed up, he created a holiday for the city.

It might have seemed to come out of nowhere, but it was the thing the city needed most right now.

Why? People needed somewhere to let it out.

Border Guard had fought Azpen and won, but somewhere along the way they had become neighbors sharing a border.

Plenty of people were unhappy about that.

Some had lost family or relatives to Azpen.

There were not enormous numbers of people like that, to be fair. Full-scale pitched battles with Azpen had been rare.

Still, there were people with grievances, and an uneasy tension drifted through the air.

Turn it around, and Azpen was in the same position.

They had taken the worse of it.

Azpen had been trying to address the problem by relocating people who had never lived near the border to areas close to it, a population resettlement within the duchy.

That was obviously Abnaier's doing.

It was the reason a great internal migration had taken place in the duchy.

In a situation like this, something was needed to bind people together.

That something was a holiday. A festival.

Krais added a few more pieces to it.

"Should we call it the Knight Order Foundation Day? Or Border Guard Defense Day?"

Enkrid did not mind either one, but since not everyone had agreed to join the knight order yet, he thought the latter was better.

And so Border Guard Defense Day came into being, and the festival was held.

Three straight days of eating and drinking, with a martial tournament on the final day.

Preliminary rounds were held within each unit, and the main event took place in Greenfield city.

Anyone who wanted to enter could, regardless of unit, and that got people excited.

The knight order only watched, but their unit members took part.

The winner received a full pouch of gold coins and, if they wanted it, an honorable discharge.

At that, Rem's unit members went wild, so wild in the preliminary rounds among themselves that the person who actually advanced to the main tournament hobbled up to the arena with a limp.

"Will you be able to fight, brother?" Audin asked, watching.

The opponent was a warrior personally trained by Audin and Teresa.

"One leg is plenty."

Rem snorted, but victory went to a member of Audin's Sacred Infantry.

"Graaah! I am a bear!"

The victory shout was a little strange, but there it was.

"Want me to teach you a Frog war song?" Ruagarne said when she heard it.

Audin declined.

"I sing quite well myself, thank you, Frog sister."

Since fully recovering, Ruagarne had been roaming the mountain range like a Frog gone mad, but recently she had been sticking close to Enkrid's side.

"Next is, oh, Fallen Clemen?"

Clemen had practically become a proper noun at this point.

She stepped forward with a short wooden sword in hand. Her opponent came from the swordsmanship infantry unit where Ragna served as captain and Ropord as vice-captain.

Someone really went ahead and named everything however they felt like.

Enkrid thought that while he watched the fight.

He always thought this, but regardless of the level of skill, there was always something to learn.

For that reason, Enkrid watched every bout from the main tournament onward in a genuinely good mood.

The fight was one-sided. Clemen was not skilled with a sword. She was skilled at fighting.

She tangled the blades together, rushed in, swept the leg, and struck the throat with a Hand Blade, and there was nothing to fault in either her footwork or the way she used her strength.

"She's good." Ruagarne nodded.

Fallen Clemen had trailed after Ruagarne and learned a few techniques, and she had since sought out instruction from others besides the Frog without discrimination, training like a madwoman ever since. That was how she had arrived here.

Sharp eyes were not even necessary. Enkrid felt something like the flow of will in Fallen Clemen's movements.

It was a kind of instinct. You could also call it insight.

The way he saw the future in combat, he saw in Clemen's movements the trace of someone moving forward.

"That one is going to make junior knight."

As with all knight orders, there was a Squire stage before junior knight. In other words, Clemen had now risen to Squire level.

She had started as an ordinary soldier. It was the result of talent and effort.

"I'll announce that winning also opens the door to joining the knight order."

Krais had been listening from behind and added one more prize to the martial tournament.

Enkrid nodded.

Why would that be a hard thing.

Of course, any soldier thinking straight would have no intention of joining the knight order.

The way Enkrid trained, far harder and more ferociously than any of them, was right there for everyone to see.

From a distance he looked like a glorious, respectable hero, but up close he was just a madman. A training fanatic.

The Madman Knights was not a name given for nothing.

From Azpen, even the Hurier family had come out for the martial tournament.

The excitement ran hot, and the winner came from Enkrid's direct unit.

"Graaaah!"

The winner roared at the sky. For a moment it seemed the person must have giant's blood.

The winner was a female soldier with her hair braided into a single plait hanging down her back. Her name was Fallen Clemen.

She wanted to become a Squire of the knight order, and so she did.

The three-day festival came to an end just like that.

After the festival, Border Guard's city improvement projects charged ahead like a carriage at full gallop.

It was similar to the old days when Enkrid would leave and come back to find a new wall built while he was gone. Once the festival ended, the city zoning was rearranged.

The land just inside the expanded left and right walls, secured earlier, was designated as the outer ring road, and the interior was divided into an inn district and a commercial district.

Craftsmen were grouped with craftsmen, merchants with merchants.

All of it was Krais's doing.

It was around then.

Enkrid had been training, meeting with Aetri, going back and forth through the city on various errands, and was heading back to the barracks when he heard it.

"The festival was so wonderful I couldn't take my eyes off it."

The blind white-haired old man was muttering nonsense in front of the barracks.

He was blind, and yet he could not take his eyes off it. What did that mean.

A joke on the level of elven wordplay.

A clear autumn afternoon.

Enkrid took the old man in with his eyes and was reaching for his grip, not knowing why, when it happened.

"Keep your distance."

Jaxon's voice came from behind. Jaxon had been approaching and had given a quiet signal, so Enkrid was not startled.

It seemed their return times had happened to overlap.

"Why?"

"That old man is strange."

Coming from Jaxon's mouth, it was an odd thing to say.