WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 562: Who Is the Vice-Captain?

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Bianca Conti wore a look of quiet displeasure.

She had arrived without prior arrangement, but she had been courteous. She had stayed in the city for several days and waited for a summons.

And the other party had simply ignored her, turned away, and disappeared.

If they had at least met her and told her they bore no love for the Empire, she could have understood that. But this was something else entirely.

Vanishing without a word, without even a yes or no about whether they would meet?

"My apologies. The Captain has stepped out on a commission."

"Yesterday I was told he was still here."

The broad-eyed man with brown hair let out a quiet sigh and gave a small shake of his head.

The gesture was perfectly natural. It said he had not expected things to turn out this way either, that he too was a victim of circumstances. That was the kind of smile it was.

Bianca Conti was a noble and matchmaker from the Empire, a woman who had dealt with countless people who wore masks when there was no masquerade ball in sight. Even so, it had been a long time since she had encountered someone who concealed their true feelings as completely as the man before her.

The way he spoke made even her feel almost sorry for him.

"The thing is, he is not exactly the type to file reports on his whereabouts. Ha, you could probably guess from the name alone, but there is something a little off about him up here."

Krais tapped the side of his own head with a half-curled finger as he said it.

Krais knew there was no world in which Enkrid would sit around flirting with a matchmaker from the Empire and discussing marriage proposals. So he saw no harm in revealing that small truth about the Captain, that there was something a touch unusual about him.

That said, Bianca did not let a vein rise on her forehead. Showing emotion first, in any situation, was the mark of an amateur.

Bianca had not conquered the Imperial social scene, but she had lived behind it, working as a matchmaker and a broker. She knew how this kind of game was played.

She would not be taken in by these moves.

Ridiculous.

The handsome man who had introduced himself as Krais performed his act flawlessly, well enough that she could have put him on an Imperial stage, but she was not watching his words or his expressions. She was watching the situation itself.

He sent word asking to meet, then spent days dodging with excuses about being busy, and now a commission? He has gone out?

He was avoiding her. Why? Because she was from the Empire? Did that make him uncomfortable?

If so, she could simply find a different angle.

Bianca had not come here on anyone's orders. She had only believed that the subject of a rumor which had spread even to the edges of the Empire would become one of her finest achievements.

"Then I will wait."

Tak.

The sound of her teacup meeting the solid rosewood table.

Bianca believed that if she could only get the man to sit across from her, she could take the heart of someone who had spent their whole life gripping a sword. It would not take long at all.

Such people devoted themselves to training and to drills, and they could achieve remarkable things in their own field. But they knew little about other things, especially about power, and about what they stood to gain.

No bear ever hated honey.

No merchant ever hated gold coins.

And no man ever hated a woman.

That was Bianca's philosophy.

Of course there were always exceptions, people whose tastes ran in entirely different directions. But she knew too well that most people did not stray far from the basic logic she had laid out.

Naturally, she also knew about the Black Flower and the Golden Witch.

But what she had to offer was not a simple marriage.

"You are welcome to stay as long as you like, but we are in the middle of an expansion inside the fortress right now, so finding a place to sleep may be a bit of a problem..."

Krais let the sentence trail off.

With a slight droop of his eyes, he conveyed that the situation was flattering in principle but inconvenient in practice. The man really was exceptional with his expressions and gestures.

"Do not worry about that."

Bianca would be perfectly fine staying at an inn.

Krais looked at Bianca's eyes, and at the eyes of the man who had come as her escort.

Behind him stood Nurat and Ruagarne, there as guards of their own.

The Empire, he thought.

Getting a read on what was happening inside the Empire from this side was not easy.

Bianca Conti, the countess who had come calling, was affiliated with the Empire, but she was not someone who lived in the Imperial Capital or near the palace.

The Gigant Mountain Range, a chain said to be larger than the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range and nicknamed the wall the gods built, lay between the Empire and the Kingdom.

That range blocked wind and cloud, which shaped the climate across the entire region.

In mythology, one of the ancient gods had fashioned those mountains and set them down upon the earth, and ever since, one side received rain while the other stayed bone dry.

When wind rose above the range, the moisture should have crossed over to the other side, but the mountains acted as a wall and stopped both wind and cloud. That natural phenomenon was what the myth described.

Krais let his thoughts drift briefly into that old story, then pulled them back to the present.

"So?"

He asked it while facing forward. He was not asking whether the woman who had just left was an Imperial envoy or a glorified matchmaker.

"The woman shows no particular signs of combat training. The man who came as her escort is a junior knight."

"Same read here. Five escorts total, right? I saw them all, consistent across the board. Not just in skill, but in quality."

Nurat and Ruagarne answered in turn.

"Quality?"

"They were taught by the same person. You can tell, they carry the look of people who have drilled the same style of fighting for a very long time."

Krais had trained enough to handle himself, but not to the level of a junior knight or anything close to it.

Honestly, looking at the people who kept turning up around Enkrid these days, Krais was fairly sure a single clean cut would take his own head right off.

Not that he had any intention of letting things reach that point, of course.

Ruagarne said her piece, then puffed out her cheeks a few times and blinked.

She had come out at Krais's request, to serve as escort and to size up the visitors, but what she had seen gave her a moment of doubt, the Will she had glimpsed in those people was startlingly refined.

That said, it was precisely because people like this existed that she had stayed here instead of following Enkrid, her subject of interest.

"This is just a guess."

Ruagarne said it, then paused as if gathering herself. A servant had poked their head in from outside the door, waiting for Krais's word, and Krais held up a hand to signal them to wait.

"But if someone had mapped out the process of awakening Will and devised a training method around it..."

"Then what?"

Krais was a skilled listener, so he nudged her along, and Ruagarne finished the thought.

"People like that might start appearing."

The Empire was beyond a great power. It was the one and only place on the continent with an Emperor.

Why was the Empire strong? There were countless reasons. Krais felt he had just glimpsed one of them.

The fact that a single person could use five junior knights as personal escorts showed the Empire's depth in a single stroke.

And this was not even anyone important. This was just one noble who had come on her own initiative.

It was not an official visit, which meant those escorts were not Empire-affiliated junior knights, so where did they belong? They could not be mere mercenaries. The only conclusion was that they were part of a unit garrisoned in an Imperial city close to the Kingdom.

Even the Empire would not post people of junior-knight caliber to stand guard at a gambling house.

From one matchmaker who had come out of the Empire, Krais had picked up several useful pieces of information.

On top of that, the other side had not even tried to hide any of it. They had let the escorts come forward openly, concealing neither their skill nor their identity.

The actual military force the Empire held would be far greater than this.

For a moment his skin prickled, and the two small things between his legs tried to retreat somewhere warmer, and a cold sweat threatened to crawl down his spine.

Krais let out a slow breath and steadied himself.

Can't let it rattle me.

One day he would build a city on the border between the Empire and the Kingdom, and from atop its walls a round device would blaze with light.

A city of pleasure was waiting for him. There was no room for fear.

The next visitor was a merchant who had come from the south.

The southern great power, Rihinshtetten, was officially an enemy nation to the Kingdom of Naurillia.

Krais thought the Kingdom had a truly impressive number of enemies.

When he actually stopped to think about it, that made sense. Any nation that wanted to expand its territory and push outward needed a foothold, and this land was fertile, its grain grew well, and it sat at the center of the continent.

Thinking about it, the sheer number of things that had happened here was extraordinary, it was somehow strange that the Kingdom had not collapsed already.

From long ago there had been times when the Cursed Ground ran rampant and Demon Creatures flooded in from every direction, and more recently there had been Count Molsen's rebellion.

The southern great power had crossed the border and started battles on multiple occasions, and somehow the Kingdom had not given ground.

The southern merchant talked at length about this and that, but to put it plainly: if Enkrid came to the southern great power, he could marry the princess.

"Have you seen the Black Flower?"

Krais deflected and refused in a roundabout way, saying he did not bother keeping score.

Enkrid was extremely particular about a woman's face, so anyone who was not more beautiful than she was would have a hard time.

Whether that was true or not, Enkrid had left all of this to him, so it fell on Krais to manufacture reasons for declining.

The exchange was brief, just a handful of sentences, but it sent a small ripple outward all the same.

"So he is a man after all, huh?"

"I heard he is especially picky about looks."

The southern merchant had a loose mouth, and put it to full use.

At that same hour, Enkrid was lying on his back watching the sky, savoring the autumn weather, letting his thoughts wander.

* * *

He had founded the order, which meant he needed to fill it with members.

Was it enough to just tell people to come in and join?

That could not be right.

Each person had their own convictions, their own will, their own goals.

You could not simply plant people where you wanted them.

If someone did that to him, would he accept it?

Not a chance.

So it would be the same for the men and women under him.

Back in the capital Nauril, there had been quite a fuss about whether it was right to make all of them knights.

But none of them had ever said they all wanted to join the order in the first place.

The people trying to hand something out were making a scene before the ones who would receive it had even given it a thought.

Not that he particularly cared what they said.

That line of thinking was what led Enkrid to sit down and put a question to each of his subordinates.

"Rem. What is it you want to do?"

Before leaving for whatever this Holy Maiden recovery mission turned out to be, he had met with the lunatics he had come up through the ranks with, one by one, for something close to an interview.

"I'm going to give them this and make them run with it."

A broad question had come back with a very specific answer.

"What is that?"

It was sitting right in front of him, so Enkrid had to ask.

Rem was holding a training axe shaped vaguely like a real one, but with no sharpened edge and a center of gravity that looked completely wrong. Where the blade should have been, there was just a chunk of iron hanging there, and the handle was solid metal as well.

Enkrid picked it up. Not quite a burden, but the weight was no joke.

It could have served as a tool for building arm muscles, but the balance was too chaotic for that either.

Would running with this thing actually be useful training?

Not bad, actually.

He thought of Rem's recoilless axe swing. The foundation of it was controlling the full weight of the weapon through muscle alone.

Not every swing could be done without recoil, but if someone could manage it even once or twice as a trump card, it could be the kind of hidden technique that saved a life.

What if every soldier in the unit could swing an axe that way?

Talent and effort in equal measure would be required, but if it worked, the unit Rem was building would be made of genuinely terrifying people.

"Not bad at all."

Enkrid said it thinking about his own training, about what Rem was trying to do, about what might come of it.

The words carried a note of genuine admiration, small but real.

Rem was more serious about training than Enkrid had expected, and this particular method would benefit everyone. It was not something he had thought up in a day or two.

You could feel the care behind it.

Enkrid thought he might try something similar himself later on.

Of course, if Rem's soldiers had heard that, they would have forgotten all about respecting the Iron Wall knight and started cursing him as a shameless ghoul of a man before coming at him with axes raised.

Enkrid moved his attention away from the training tool and asked again.

"Is wiping out the Cursed Ground really all you want?"

In the west there was the Cursed Ground called Silence, and Rem wanted to erase it.

But was that really all?

Was that truly the one and only thing he wanted?

Was joining the order actually what Rem was after?

"What are you trying to say?"

Rem tilted his head. Enkrid sometimes, honestly, quite often, came out with strange things. This seemed like more of the same.

The gist of it was this: the order had been founded, and there was a place in it for Rem, but if Rem truly wanted something else, he was free to go.

"What kind of nonsense is that? Am I not the vice-captain?"

Rem asked, brow furrowed, wondering what in the world he was hearing.

Enkrid thought about it for a moment, then answered.

"There is no vice-captain."

No position below captain. That was just how it had to be.

He could not create a rank that was sure to go beyond mere conflict and become an all-consuming fire.

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